A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

The literature produced by members varied widely in both content and quality: poetry, essays, fiction, reviews, news items, polemics, and every other form of writing that can fit into a small compass. If it is generally true that most of this material is the work of tyros—’amateurs’ in the pejorative sense—then it means only that amateur journalism was performing a sound if humble function as a proving-ground for writers. Some amateurs did in fact go on to publish professionally. And yet, Lovecraft was all too correct when, late in life, he summed up the general qualitative level of amateur work: ‘God, what crap!’¹

Each association held an annual convention—NAPA in early July, UAPA in late July—at which the officers for the next official year were elected. The chief offices were President, Vice-President, Treasurer, and Official Editor. Other offices—including the Department of Public Criticism—were filled by appointments by the President. With this elaborate hierarchy, it was no surprise that some members became only interested in attaining eminence in the organization by holding office, and that intensely bitter, personal, and vituperative election campaigns were held to ensure the victory of a given individual or faction. All this becomes particularly absurd when we realize how few individuals were involved in amateurdom at any given time. The November 1918 United Amateur lists only 247 active members; the November 1917 National Amateur lists 227 (many individuals belonged to both associations).

Amateur journalism was exactly the right thing for Lovecraft at this critical juncture in his life. For the next ten years he devoted himself with unflagging energy to the amateur cause, and for the rest of his life he maintained some contact with it. For someone so unworldly, so sequestered, and so diffident about his own abilities, the tiny world of amateur journalism was a place where he could shine. Lovecraft realised the beneficial effects of amateurdom when he wrote in 1921:

Amateur Journalism has provided me with the very world in which I live. Of a nervous and reserved temperament, and cursed with an aspiration which far exceeds my endowments, I am a typical misfit in the larger world of endeavour, and singularly unable to derive enjoyment from ordinary miscellaneous activities. In 1914, when the kindly hand of amateurdom was first extended to me, I was as close to the state of vegetation as any animal well can be … With the advent of the United I obtained a renewed will to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile. For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening void. (‘What Amateurdom and I Have Done for Each Other’)

To this analysis there is really very little to add, although a modicum of detail is necessary to flesh out the picture and to pinpoint exactly how this transformation occurred. As for what Lovecraft did for amateurdom, that too is a long story, and one worth studying carefully.

In 1914, when Lovecraft entered amateur journalism, he found two schisms that were creating much bad blood and using up valuable energy. The first was, of course, the split between the National and United Amateur Press Associations, which had occurred when the latter was founded in 1895. Some members did indeed belong to both associations; Lovecraft, although labelling himself repeatedly and ostentatiously a loyal ‘United man’, joined the National himself as early as 1917, and would later serve as interim president.

The other split was one within the United itself. Lovecraft addresses this matter in two essays, ‘The Pseudo-United’ (United Amateur, May 1920) and ‘A Matter of Uniteds’ (Bacon’s Essays, summer 1927). In 1912 occurred a hotly contested election at the UAPA convention in La Grande, Oregon; the result was that both of the two candidates for president, Helene E. Hoffman and Harry Shepherd, declared themselves the winner. In his various remarks Lovecraft never makes it clear that it was the Hoffman faction that refused to accept the verdict of the UAPA directors (who confirmed the election of Shepherd) and withdrew. Indeed, if all one knows of the controversy comes from Lovecraft, one would think it was the Shepherd group that was the rebel organization; but in fact the amateur world to this day regards the Hoffman group as the rebels and the discontents, even though many acknowledge their literary and numerical superiority.

In any event, the Hoffman supporters established their own association, retaining the title United Amateur Press Association, while the group around Shepherd called itself the United Amateur Press Association of America. Lovecraft joined the former because he had been recruited by Edward F. Daas of that faction; probably he did not at the time even know of the existence of the other, as it was largely centred on Seattle, Washington. It is, however, somewhat ironic that what Lovecraft called the ‘pseudo-United’ actually outlasted his own United; the latter essentially collapsed from disorganization and apathy around 1926, while the other United carried on until 1939. But for all practical purposes it was a moribund association, and when Lovecraft was persuaded to resume amateur activity in the 1930s he saw no option but to work for the NAPA.

The United’s split with the National was something Lovecraft vigorously supported and never wished to see healed. His contempt for the older group—which he fancied (perhaps rightly) to be a haven of old-timers resting on their laurels, men who looked back fondly to their lost youth as amateur printers and typographers, and politicians devoted to furthering their own causes and gaining transient and meaningless power in an insignificant arena—is unremitting. In ‘Consolidation’s Autopsy’ (published in the Lake Breeze for April 1915 under the not very accurate pseudonym ‘El Imparcial’) he dynamites the position of those Nationalites who are seeking some sort of rapport with the United. Dismissing the National as ‘an inactive Old Men’s Home’, he writes scornfully of their fostering the ideal of the ‘small boy with a printing press’—a somewhat double-edged charge, since Lovecraft himself had been exactly that only a few years earlier. Indeed, perhaps the vehemence of his response rests precisely in his awareness that he himself had a somewhat arrested adolescence and was anomalously long in separating himself from boyhood interests.

As Lovecraft plunged into amateur activity, contributing essays and poems (later stories) to amateur journals, becoming involved in heated controversies, and in general taking stock of the little world he had stumbled upon, he gradually formulated a belief— one that he gained remarkably early and maintained to the end of his life—that amateur journalism was an ideal vehicle for the effecting of two important goals: first, abstract self-expression without thought of remuneration; and second, education, especially for those who had not had the benefit of formal schooling. The first became a cardinal tenet in Lovecraft’s later aesthetic theory, and its development during his amateur period may be the most important contribution of amateur journalism to his literary outlook. It is not, of course, likely that amateurdom actually originated this idea in Lovecraft’s mind; indeed, he would not have responded so vigorously to amateurdom if he had not already held this view of literature as an elegant diversion.

At the same time that Lovecraft was hailing the non-mercenary spirit of amateurdom, he was regarding the amateur world as a practice arena for professional publication. This is not a paradox because what he meant by ‘professional publication’ was not hackwork but publication in distinguished magazines or with reputed book publishers. In so doing one is not buckling down to produce insincere pseudo-literature simply for money but allowing the polished products of one’s ‘self-expression’ to achieve a worthy audience.

The means to achieve these lofty goals in amateurdom was education. It is surely plausible to believe that Lovecraft’s own failures in formal education caused him to espouse this goal as fervently as he did. Consider his statement in ‘For What Does the United Stand?’ (United Amateur, May 1920):

The United aims to assist those whom other forms of literary influence cannot reach. The non-university man, the dwellers in different places, the recluse, the invalid, the very young, the elderly; all these are included within our scope. And beside our novices stand persons of mature cultivation and experience, ready to assist for the sheer joy of assisting. In no other society does wealth or previous learning count for so little … It is an university, stripped of every artificiality and conventionality, and thrown open to all without distinction. Here may every man shine according to his genius, and here may the small as well as the great writer know the bliss of appreciation and the glory of recognised achievement.

This all sounds very well, but Lovecraft regarded it as axiomatic that he was one of the ‘great’ writers in this little realm, one of the ‘persons of mature cultivation and experience’ who would raise his lessers to whatever heights they could achieve. This was not arrogance on Lovecraft’s part but plain truth; he really was one of the leading figures of amateurdom at this time, and his reputation has remained high in this small field. This ideal of amateurdom as a sort of informal university was something Lovecraft found compelling and attempted—ultimately in vain—to bring about.

Only a few months after he joined amateur journalism, Lovecraft obtained a forum whereby he could put many of his developing theories—particularly that of education—into practice. Around November 1914 he was appointed by President Dora M. Hepner to take over the chairmanship of the Department of Public Criticism. It was the first office Lovecraft held, and he made the most of it.

The office entailed Lovecraft’s writing a lengthy article for the United Amateur criticizing in detail each and every amateur journal that was submitted for review. His first article appeared in the January 1915 issue, and over the next five years Lovecraft wrote at least sixteen more. These pieces must be read to gain some idea of his devotion to the amateur cause. Plodding and schoolmasterly as many of them are—painstakingly correcting every grammatical blunder, pointing out flaws in prosody, lapses in taste, and errors in fact—it is exactly the sort of criticism that the amateurs needed. It would have been futile to present a lofty dissection of the aesthetic substance of their work when many were struggling to achieve the barest minimum of grammatical correctness in prose and verse. Lovecraft is tireless in the patient, careful advice he gives: he always attempts to find some merit in the work under consideration, but never lets a technical flaw go by.

Naturally, Lovecraft had his biases. His greatest flaws as an official critic (at least in his early phase) are political and social prejudices and a relentless advocacy of ‘Georgian’ standards in prose and verse. Slang and colloquialism particularly offended him. Another frequent target was simplified spelling. We may find Lovecraft’s comments on this subject somewhat heavy-handed— akin to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut—but simple spelling was being advocated by a number of distinguished critics and grammarians of the day. Lovecraft delivers a learned lecture on the history of the subject in ‘The Simple Spelling Mania’ (United Cooperative, December 1918).

The degree to which Lovecraft was devoted to the literary standards of the eighteenth century is no more evident than in ‘The Case for Classicism’ (United Co-operative, June 1919), in which he takes to task one Professor Philip B. McDonald for belittling the relevance of classic authors in developing effective style and rhetoric. Although Lovecraft claims that ‘It is not my purpose here to engage in any extensive battle of ancient and modern books, such as that fought in Saint-James’s Library and veraciously chronicled by Dean Swift’, such a battle of the books is exactly what Lovecraft conducts here: ‘I cannot refrain from insisting on the permanent paramountcy of classical literature as opposed to the superficial productions of this disturbed and degenerate age.’ As if this were not enough, Lovecraft continues:

The literary genius of Greece and Rome, developed under peculiarly favourable circumstances, may fairly be said to have completed the art and science of expression. Unhurried and profound, the classical author achieved a standard of simplicity, moderation, and elegance of taste, which all succeeding time has been powerless to excel or even to equal.

This utterance is quite remarkable. To say that the ancients ‘completed the art and science of expression’ means that there is nothing left for subsequent writers to do but to imitate; and Lovecraft in fact goes on to say that ‘those modern periods have been most cultivated, in which the models of antiquity have been most faithfully followed’. What Lovecraft ignores here is that even in the eighteenth century it was the adaptation of classical models to the contemporary world that produced the most viable literature of the period. The brilliance of Johnson’s London or Pope’s Dunciad stems not from their aping of the forms of Roman satire but from their application of these forms to vivify very modern concerns.

With attitudes like these, it is not surprising that Lovecraft was, throughout the course of his amateur career, forced to defend himself against those who felt that his criticism was both too harsh and misguided. Lovecraft addresses the issue in several essays, including ‘Amateur Criticism’ (Conservative, July 1918) and ‘Lucubrations Lovecraftian’ (United Co-operative, April 1921). The tone of this latter piece is particularly sharp precisely because he placed so much value in the Department of Public Criticism as a tool for the educational improvement of amateur writing. Lovecraft himself certainly felt so during the three terms he was Chairman of the department (1915–16, 1916–17, and 1918–19), and he very likely inculcated his views to the two other chairmen who served between 1915 and 1922 (Rheinhart Kleiner (1917–18) and Alfred Galpin (1919-22)), since both were close friends of his. The fact that both these individuals shared many of Lovecraft’s strict views on the ‘dignity of journalism’ may have caused resentment from those members who did not.

Beginning some time in 1914 Lovecraft made an attempt to practise his educational ideal very close to home, by assisting in the formation of a Providence Amateur Press Club. The impetus for this club came from one Victor L. Basinet, who on the suggestion of Edward H. Cole (a Boston amateur journalist associated with the NAPA) formed an amateur press club amongst some working-class people in the ‘North End’ of Providence who were attending night classes at a local high school. Cole—who was very likely already in touch with Lovecraft—probably urged the group to gain assistance from the UAPA’s only Rhode Island member; and Lovecraft, thinking that this attempt to ‘uplift the masses’ might succeed better than the incident with Arthur Fredlund eight years earlier, gave considerable assistance.

Most of the members were Irish; among them was a particularly feisty young man, about a year and a half older than Lovecraft, named John T. Dunn (1889–1983). The press club set about assembling an amateur journal, the Providence Amateur; the first issue (June 1915) appears to have been written entirely by Lovecraft and Dunn, although only three of the six pieces are signed. The second issue (February 1916) is more substantial, although the typographical accuracy is very poor. This issue contains contributions by a variety of members, including two poems by Lovecraft: ‘To Charlie of the Comics’ (unsigned) and ‘The Bride of the Sea’ (as by ‘Lewis Theobald, Jr.’). In this issue Lovecraft is listed as Official Editor.

Dunn, interviewed by L. Sprague de Camp in 1975, provides some fascinating glimpses of Lovecraft’s personal comportment at the meetings of the club:

Dunn found Lovecraft … odd or even eccentric. At gatherings, Lovecraft sat stiffly staring forward, except when he turned his head towards someone who spoke to him. He spoke in a low monotone.

‘He sat—he usually sat like that, looking straight ahead, see? Then he’d answer a question, and go back again,’ said Father Dunn. ‘I can see him now … and he looked straight ahead; and … he didn’t emphasize things. He nodded sometimes to emphasize a word or an expression.

‘I liked the fellow,’ he continued. ‘I didn’t have anything against him at all, see? Only we did disagree; but I hope we disagreed like gentlemen, see?’

…

Lovecraft’s voice was high-pitched but not what one would call shrill; Dunn said it was about like his own. Lovecraft had great self-control, never losing his temper no matter how heated the argument. ‘He—ah—I never saw him show any temper, see? But when he wrote, he wrote very vigorously; there’s no doubt about that, see …? And he never got excited like I would get excited.’²

Dunn and Lovecraft certainly did have some epistolary fireworks, especially over the Irish question. Dunn later refused to register for the draft and was imprisoned for a time, but was released after the war.

Lovecraft washed his hands of the club shortly after the appearance of the second issue, although he continued to keep in touch with Dunn for another year or so. The club itself had definitely folded by the fall of 1916. So ended Lovecraft’s second attempt to uplift the masses.

I have made reference to the Conservative. This was, of course, Lovecraft’s own amateur journal, and the first periodical he edited since the demise of The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy in February 1909. Although he was on the editorial board of several other amateur journals, the Conservative was the only one of which he was the sole editor. Thirteen issues appeared from 1915 to 1923, broken down as follows:

Volume I: April 1915, July 1915, October 1915, January 1916 Volume II: April 1916, July 1916, October 1916, January 1917 Volume III: July 1917

Volume IV: July 1918

Volume V: July 1919

No. 12: March 1923

No. 13: July 1923

The issues range from four to twenty-eight pages. The first three issues were written almost entirely by Lovecraft, but thereafter his contributions decline considerably except for occasional poems and—beginning with the October 1916 issue—a regular column of opinion entitled ‘In the Editor’s Study’.

It is clear that Lovecraft welcomed the prospect of editing his own paper rather than merely contributing random pieces to other amateur journals or appearing in the official organ. What this allowed him to do—aside from promoting his own vision of amateurdom as a haven for literary excellence and a tool for humanist education—was to express his own opinions fearlessly. He did just that. The ‘Editorial’ in the July 1915 issue contains his statement of editorial policy:

That the arts of literature and literary criticism will receive prime attention from The Conservative seems very probable. The increasing use among us of slovenly prose and lame metre, supported and sustained by the light reviewers of the amateur press, demands an active opponent, even though a lone one, and the profound reverence of The Conservative for the polished writers of a more correct age, fits him for a task to which his mediocre talent might not otherwise recommend him.

…

Outside the domain of pure literature, The Conservative will ever be found an enthusiastic champion of total abstinence and prohibition; of moderate, healthy militarism as contrasted with dangerous and unpatriotic peace-preaching; of Pan-Saxonism, or the domination by the English and kindred races over the lesser divisions of mankind; and of constitutional representative government, as opposed to the pernicious and contemptible false schemes of anarchy and socialism.

A mighty tall agenda. I have already touched on some of the controversies over literature in which Lovecraft engaged; his political debates—both in published works and in private correspondence—were no less vigorous, and I shall treat them later. We will find that some of Lovecraft’s early opinions are quite repugnant, and many of them are uttered in a cocksure, dogmatic manner greatly in contrast with his later views. Nevertheless, it was evident to all amateurs that the editor of the Conservative was an intellectual force to be dealt with.

Lovecraft’s official career in amateur journalism was augmented by his election in July 1915 as First Vice-President of the UAPA. Part of his responsibility was to be the head of the Recruiting Committee, for which he wrote the pamphlet United Amateur Press Association: Exponent of Amateur Journalism. This, the second separate publication by Lovecraft (for the first, The Crime of Crimes (1915), see below), was issued in late 1915.

For the next term (1916–17) Lovecraft had no official function except Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism. He was, however, elected President at the UAPA convention in late July 1917. For the next five years he and his associates essentially controlled the UAPA, and the result really was a very significant raising of the literary tone. For a time it looked as if Lovecraft’s goals for amateurdom would be grandly fulfilled.

During this whole period Lovecraft had recommenced the writing of monthly astronomy articles, this time for the Providence Evening News. The first one appears in the issue for 1 January 1914, and hence actually predates his entry into amateur journalism. I have no doubt that Lovecraft was paid for each of the fifty-three articles he published.

The Evening News articles become tedious and repetitious if read all at once, for they are in large part merely accounts of the notable celestial phenomena for the month: the phases of the moon, the constellations visible in the morning or evening sky, any eclipses, meteor showers, or other events of note, and the like. After a year, of course, many of the same phenomena will recur. Nevertheless, Lovecraft gradually loosens up a little and introduces other sidelights along the way. In particular, he becomes keen on explaining the origin of the Greek or Roman names for the constellations, and this naturally allows him to recount, sometimes at considerable length, the myths behind such names as Castor and Pollux, Argo Navis (recall his lost juvenile work, The Argonauts), and many others. His early reading of Bulfinch and other mythographers held in him good stead here.

In the fall of 1914, however, as Lovecraft was steadily writing article after article for the News, a rude interruption occurred. An article entitled ‘Astrology and the European War’ by one J. F. Hartmann appeared in the issue for 4 September 1914—only three days after Lovecraft’s column for that month, and in the exact place in the newspaper (the centre of the last page) occupied by his column. Joachim Friedrich Hartmann (1848–1930) was, one imagines, of German ancestry, but was born in Pennsylvania. He came to Providence no later than 1912.³ Hartmann’s article begins resoundingly with an attack on the ‘vulgar prejudice against the noble science of astrology by otherwise learned men’ and goes on to transcribe certain predictions for the rest of the year. Given the state of international relations in Europe in 1914, the predictions are not especially remarkable: ‘The influences operating in King George’s horoscope are very unfavourable’; ‘The kaiser is under very adverse directions, and danger both to health and person is indicated’; and so on.

This was just the sort of thing to make Lovecraft see red. He began with a straightforward but somewhat intemperate response entitled ‘Science versus Charlatanry’, published in the issue for 9 September. But Lovecraft had underestimated his foe. Hartmann responded with a direct rebuttal to Lovecraft’s letter in the issue for 7 October, addressing Lovecraft’s points sytematically and actually scoring a few telling blows. Three days later, on 10 October, a letter by Lovecraft appeared under the title ‘The Falsity of Astrology’. This letter is still more intemperate than the first. While asserting that Hartmann had said little new in his response, Lovecraft’s own letter does little to flesh out his argument.

But before Hartmann could respond to this latest attack, Lovecraft struck back in a different manner, adapting Jonathan Swift’s attacks on the astrologer Partridge, written under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaffe. The result is a series of articles, as by ‘Isaac Bickerstaffe, Jun.’, mercilessly poking fun at Hartmann and astrology in general. Lovecraft does not follow Swift in exact particulars—Swift’s tour de force had been to predict the death of Partridge, and then to follow it up with a very convincing account of Partridge’s death, after which the poor devil had a very difficult time proving that he was still alive—but merely maintains that, by its own principles, astrology ought to be able to predict events far in the future rather than merely a year or so in advance. Accordingly, one of Lovecraft’s articles concludes with a prediction of the earth’s destruction on 26 February 4954. In spite of several game rebuttals by Hartmann (in which it becomes pitifully obvious that he has no idea that Bickerstaffe is Lovecraft), the satires did the trick and shut him up.

From May to February 1915 Lovecraft published a series of fourteen rather routine articles entitled ‘Mysteries of the Heavens Revealed by Astronomy’ in the Asheville (N.C.) Gazette-News, although part of the thirteenth and the fourteenth article have not come to light. This series claims to be a systematic and elementary treatise on all phases of astronomy for the complete novice. As such, ‘Mysteries of the Heavens’ is a good example of what Lovecraft might have done had he decided to become merely a popular science writer. Mildly interesting as the series is, it is good for the sake of literature that he did not so limit his horizons. The assignment was presumably arranged for Lovecraft by Chester Munroe, who had established himself in Asheville.

If Lovecraft’s views on prose style were conservative and oldfashioned, in poetry they were still more so, both in precept and in practice. We have seen that his poetry of the early teens bears a self-consciously antiquated cast, and is in some ways more archaistic than even some of his juvenile verse, which (as in the ‘Attempted Journey’) at least features some contemporaneousness in subject.

The interesting thing is that, right from the beginning, Lovecraft was aware that his poetry had relatively little intrinsic merit aside from academic correctness in metre and rhyme. Writing in 1914 to Maurice W. Moe, a high-school English teacher and one of his earliest amateur colleagues, he stated in defence of his inveterate use of the heroic couplet: ‘Take the form away, and nothing remains. I have no real poetic ability, and all that saves my verse from utter worthlessness is the care which I bestow on its metrical construction.’⁴ In 1929 Lovecraft articulated perhaps the soundest evaluation of his verse-writing career that it is possible to give:

In my metrical novitiate I was, alas, a chronic & inveterate mimic; allowing my antiquarian tendencies to get the better of my abstract poetic feeling. As a result, the whole purpose of my writing soon became distorted—till at length I wrote only as a means of re-creating around me the atmosphere of my 18th century favourites. Self-expression as such sank out of sight, & my sole test of excellence was the degree with which I approached the style of Mr. Pope, Dr. Young, Mr. Thomson, Mr. Addison, Mr. Tickell, Mr. Parnell, Dr. Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, & so on. My verse lost every vestige of originality & sincerity, its only core being to reproduce the typical forms & sentiments of the Georgian scene amidst which it was supposed to be produced. Language, vocabulary, ideas, imagery—everything succumbed to my own intense purpose of thinking & dreaming myself back into that world of periwigs & long s’s which for some odd reason seemed to me the normal world.⁵

To this analysis very little need be added. What it demonstrates is that Lovecraft utilized poetry not for aesthetic but for psychological ends: as a means of tricking himself into believing that the eighteenth century still existed—or, at least, that he was a product of the eighteenth century who had somehow been transported into an alien and repulsive era. And if the ‘sole test of excellence’ of Lovecraft’s verse was its success in duplicating the style of the great Georgian poets, then it must flatly be declared that his poetry is a resounding failure. He certainly manages to copy the mechanical externals of eighteenth-century verse, but its vital essence invariably escapes him.

Lovecraft’s poetry falls into a number of groupings differentiated generally by subject matter. The bulk of his verse must fall under the broad rubric of occasional poetry; within this class there are such things as poems to friends and associates, seasonal poems, poems on amateur affairs, imitations of classical poetry (especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and other miscellaneous verse. There is, at least up to about 1919, a large array of political or patriotic verse, almost entirely worthless. There is also a small group of mediocre philosophical or didactic verse. Satiric poetry bulks large in Lovecraft’s early period, and this is perhaps the most consistently meritorious of his early metrical output. Weird verse does not become extensive until 1917—the precise time when Lovecraft resumed the writing of weird fiction—so shall be considered later. These categories of course overlap: some of the satiric poetry is directed toward colleagues or individuals in the amateur circle, or is on political subjects.

Of the occasional poetry in general it is difficult to speak kindly. In many instances one quite is literally at a loss to wonder what Lovecraft was attempting to accomplish with such verse. These poems appear frequently to have served merely as the equivalents of letters. Indeed, Lovecraft once confessed that ‘In youth I scarcely did any letter-writing—thanking anybody for a present was so much of an ordeal that I would rather have written a two-hundredfifty-line pastoral or a twenty-page treatise on the rings of Saturn’.⁶

Of the seasonal poems very little can be said. There are poems on almost every month of the year, as well as each of the individual seasons; but all are trite, mechanical, and quite without genuine feeling. One heroic work—in more ways than one—that requires some consideration is ‘Old Christmas’ (Tryout, December 1918; written in late 1917), a 332-line monstrosity that is Lovecraft’s single longest poem. Actually, if one can accept the premise of this poem—a re-creation of a typical Christmas night in the England of Queen Anne’s time—then one can derive a certain enjoyment from its resolutely wholesome and cheerful couplets. The sheer geniality of the poem eventually wins one over if one can endure the antiquated diction.

Two facets of Lovecraft’s poetry that must be passed over in merciful brevity are his classical imitations and his philosophical poetry. Lovecraft seemed endlessly fond of producing flaccid imitations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—his first poetic love, let us recall—including such things as ‘Hylas and Myrrha: A Tale’ (Tryout, May 1919), ‘Myrrha and Strephon’ (Tryout, July 1919), and several others. Of the early philosophical poetry, only a few are notable. ‘Inspiration’ (Conservative, October 1916) is a delicate two-stanza poem on literary inspiration coming to a writer at an unexpected moment. It is of importance largely because it is the very first piece of professionally published poetry by Lovecraft outside of local newspaper appearances: it was reprinted in the National Magazine of Boston in November 1916. Lovecraft had a number of poems printed in this magazine over the next several years.

As the years passed, it became evident to Lovecraft’s readers in the amateur press (as it was always evident to Lovecraft himself) that in his poetry he was a self-consciously antiquated fossil with admirable technical skill but no real poetic feeling. Eventually Lovecraft began to poke fun at himself on this score, as in ‘On the Death of a Rhyming Critic’ (Toledo Amateur, July 1917) and ‘The Dead Bookworm’ (United Amateur, September 1919).

This brings us to Lovecraft’s satiric poetry, which not only ranges over a very wide array of subject matter but is clearly the only facet of his poetry aside from his weird verse that is of any account. Kleiner made this point in ‘A Note on Howard P. Lovecraft’s Verse’ (United Amateur, March 1919), the first critical article on Lovecraft:

Many who cannot read his longer and more ambitious productions find Mr. Lovecraft’s light or humorous verse decidedly refreshing. As a satirist along familiar lines, particularly those laid down by Butler, Swift and Pope, he is most himself—paradoxical as it seems. In reading his satires one cannot help but feel the zest with which the author has composed them. They are admirable for the way in which they reveal the depth and intensity of Mr. Lovecraft’s convictions, while the wit, irony, sarcasm and humour to be found in them serve as an indication of his powers as a controversialist. The almost relentless ferocity of his satires is constantly relieved by an attendant broad humour which has the merit of causing the reader to chuckle more than once in the perusal of some attack levelled against the particular person or policy which may have incurred Mr. Lovecraft’s displeasure.

This analysis is exactly on target. Lovecraft himself remarked in 1921: ‘Whatever merriment I have is always derived from the satirical principle.’⁷

Literary faults or literary modernism (much the same thing to Lovecraft at this time) are also the target of many satires. When Charles D. Isaacson in his amateur journal In a Minor Key championed Walt Whitman as the ‘Greatest American Thinker’, Lovecraft responded with a sizzling rebuttal in prose entitled ‘In a Major Key’ (Conservative, July 1915) in which he included an untitled poem on Whitman:

Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line

Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever’d fancy shuns the measur’d place, And copies Ovid’s filth without his grace.

And so on. Whitman was the perfect anathema for Lovecraft at this time, not only in his scornful abandonment of traditional metre but in his frank discussions of both homosexual and heterosexual sex.

Lovecraft’s greatest poem in this regard is ‘Amissa Minerva’ (Toledo Amateur, May 1919). Steven J. Mariconda has written a thorough commentary on this poem, and has illuminated many of its distinctive features.⁸ After supplying a highly encapsulated history of poetry from Homer to Swinburne, Lovecraft launches upon a systematic attack on modern poetry, mentioning Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and others by name. The subject matter of modern poetry offends Lovecraft (‘Exempt from wit, each dullard pours his ink / In odes to bathtubs, or the kitchen sink’) as much as its abandonment of traditional rhyme and metre.

Actually, Lovecraft’s first exposure to poetic radicalism had occurred some years before. ‘I have lately been amusing myself by a perusal of some of the “Imagism” nonsense of the day’, he writes in August 1916.⁹ ‘As a species of pathological phenomena it is interesting.’ This provides a sufficient indication of Lovecraft’s attitude toward free verse in general and Imagism in particular. I am not sure what works Lovecraft read at this time; perhaps he read some of the three anthologies entitled Some Imagist Poets, which appeared between 1915 and 1917. He sums up his objections to modern poetry in ‘The Vers Libre Epidemic’ (Conservative, January 1917). Here Lovecraft distinguishes between two forms of radicalism, one of mere form, the other of thought and ideals. For the first, Lovecraft cites a fellow-amateur, Anne Tillery Renshaw, whom he admired greatly for her devotion to the amateur cause but whose poetic theories he found every opportunity to rebut. He frequently remarks that, for all the metrical novelty of her own poetry, it very often lapses in spite of itself into fairly orthodox forms. In ‘Metrical Regularity’ (Conservative, July 1915) Lovecraft paraphrases her theory (‘the truly inspired bard must chant forth his feelings independently of form or language, permitting each changing impulse to alter the rhythm of his lay, and blindly resigning his reason to the “fine frenzy” of his mood’) as expressed in an article in her amateur journal, Ole Miss’, for May 1915; to which Lovecraft makes the pointed response: ‘The “language of the heart” must be clarified and made intelligible to other hearts, else its purport will forever be confined to its creator.’ This single sentence could serve as an adequate indictment of the obscurantism of much twentieth-century poetry.

The second, more disturbing type of radicalism—of thought and ideals—is treated more harshly. In ‘The Vers Libre Epidemic’ this school is said to be represented by ‘Amy Lowell at her worst’: ‘a motley horde of hysterical and half-witted rhapsodists whose basic principle is the recording of their momentary moods and psychopathic phenomena in whatever amorphous and meaningless phrases may come to their tongues or pens at the moment of inspirational (or epileptic) seizure’. This is fine polemic, but not very good reasoned argument. Lovecraft would carry on the battle against avant-garde poetry for the rest of his life, although one imagines that by the 1930s he was beginning to feel that the struggle was hopeless. But this did not alter his devotion to conservative poetry, although in his later arguments he modified his position considerably and advocated the view that poetry must speak straightforwardly, but elegantly and coherently, in the language of its own day.

Lovecraft frequently used pseudonyms for his contributions to the amateur press, especially for poetry. A total of about twenty pseudonyms have so far been identified. Only a few, however, were used with any regularity: Humphry Littlewit, Esq.; Henry PagetLowe; Ward Phillips; Edward Softly; and, most frequent of all, Lewis Theobald, Jun. Some of these names are scarcely very concealing of Lovecraft’s identity. The Lewis Theobald pseudonym, of course, derives from the hapless Shakespearian scholar whom Pope pilloried in the first version (1728) of The Dunciad.

In some cases Lovecraft used pseudonyms merely because he was contributing poetry so voluminously to the amateur press— especially to C. W. Smith’s Tryout—that he perhaps did not wish to create the impression that he was hogging more space than he deserved. In other instances, Lovecraft may have genuinely wished to disguise his identity because of the anomalous content of the poem involved. But it becomes very difficult to characterize some of Lovecraft’s pseudonyms, especially those under which a large number of works were published, and he evidently used them merely as the spirit moved him and without much thought of creating any genuine persona for the pseudonyms in question.

Many of Lovecraft’s early poems were on political subjects. Political events of the period 1914–17 offered abundant opportunities for Lovecraft’s polemical pen, given his early attitudes on race, social class, and militarism. Lovecraft could of course not know that his entry into amateur journalism in April 1914 would occur only four months before the outbreak of the First World War; but once the war did commence, and once he saw that his country was not about to enter it any time soon to stand with his beloved England, Lovecraft’s ire was stirred. For prose attacks on world affairs his chosen vehicle was the Conservative; his verses on world affairs were scattered far and wide throughout amateurdom.

Lovecraft could not abide Americans not standing with their English brethren to battle the Huns, and it must have infuriated him not merely that the government failed to intervene in the European war but that American public opinion was resolutely against such intervention. Even the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915—resulting in the loss of 128 Americans in its death toll of more than 1200–only began a slow change in people’s minds against Germany. The incident led Lovecraft to write a thunderous polemic in verse, ‘The Crime of Crimes: Lusitania, 1915’. There is no question of Lovecraft’s burning sincerity in this poem; but the antiquated metre and diction he has used here makes it difficult to take the poem seriously, and it gains an unintentional air of frivolity, almost of self-parody. This could be said for much of Lovecraft’s political verse.

‘The Crime of Crimes’ has the distinction of being Lovecraft’s first separately published work. It appeared in a Welsh amateur journal, Interesting Items, for July 1915, and apparently at about the same time was issued as a four-page pamphlet by the editor of the paper, Arthur Harris of Llandudno, Wales. This item is now one of the rarest of Lovecraft’s publications; only three copies are known to exist. I do not know how Lovecraft came in touch with Harris; perhaps he sent him the first issue of the Conservative. In any event, Lovecraft stayed sporadically in touch with Harris for the rest of his life.

The Lusitania incident led to President Woodrow Wilson’s celebrated utterance, ‘There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight’, something that infuriated Lovecraft and which he threw back in Wilson’s teeth at every opportunity, especially in poems. Lovecraft published an array of anti-pacifist poems (‘Pacifist War Song—1917’, Tryout, March 1917; ‘The Peace Advocate’, Tryout, May 1917) and articles (‘The Renaissance of Manhood’, Conservative, October 1915), along with any number of truly awful poems expressing loyalty to England (‘1914’, Interesting Items, March 1915; ‘An American to Mother England’, Poesy, January 1916; ‘The Rose of England’, Scot, October 1916; ‘Britannia Victura’, Inspiration, April 1917; ‘An American to the British Flag’, Little Budget, December 1917).

Lovecraft’s immediate reaction to the war, however, was a curious one. He did not care what the actual causes of the war were, or who was to blame; his prime concern was in stopping what he saw was a suicidal racial civil war between the two sides of ‘Anglo-Saxondom’. It is here that Lovecraft’s racism comes fully to the forefront: ‘In the unnatural racial alignment of the various warring powers we behold a defiance of anthropological principles that cannot but bode ill for the future of the world.’ This is from ‘The Crime of the Century’, one of the salvoes in Lovecraft’s first issue (April 1915) of the Conservative. What makes the war so appalling for Lovecraft is that England and Germany (as well as Belgium, Holland, Austria, Scandinavia, and Switzerland) are all part of the Teutonic race, and therefore should on no account be battling each other. Political enemies though they may be, England and Germany are racially one:

The Teuton is the summit of evolution. That we may consider intelligently his place in history we must cast aside the popular nomenclature which would confuse the names ‘Teuton’ and ‘German’, and view him not nationally but racially, identifying his fundamental stock with the tall, pale, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, long-headed ‘Xanthochroi’ as described by Huxley, amongst whom the class of languages we call ‘Teutonic’ arose, and who today constitute the majority of the Teutonic-speaking population of our globe.

We have already seen Lovecraft’s prejudice against blacks manifest so early as the age of fourteen; whence did these ideas of Teutonic superiority arise? The above passage itself suggests one source: Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley’s work is too complex and nuanced to be branded as racist, and he was very circumspect when it came to notions of racial superiority or inferiority; but in ‘The Crime of the Century’ Lovecraft has made explicit reference to two essays by Huxley, ‘On the Methods and Results of Ethnology’ (1865) and ‘On the Aryan Question’ (1890), both included in Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays (1894). In the former essay Huxley coins the term ‘Xanthochroi’ (races that are yellowhaired and pale in complexion), applying it to the inhabitants of northern Europe, ultimate descendants of the ‘Nordic’ barbarians. Along with the Melanochroi (pale-complexioned but dark-haired) who occupy the Mediterranean lands and the Middle East, the Xanthochroi were and are the pinnacle of civilization: ‘It is needless to remark upon the civilization of these two great stocks. With them has originated everything that is highest in science, in art, in law, in politics, and in mechanical inventions. In their hands, at the present moment, lies the order of the social world, and to them its progress is committed.’¹⁰

Although Lovecraft’s statements make it evident that he was appealing to evolutionary theories in his vaunting of the Teuton, it had been fashionable for nearly a century to praise Teutons, AngloSaxons, Nordics, or Aryans (all these terms being extremely nebulous and frequently interchangeable in their application) as the summit of civilization. English and American historians in particular—beginning with Sir Francis Palgrave’s Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832), and continuing on through such distinguished scholars as Edward A. Freeman, J. R. Green, Francis Parkman, William H. Prescott, and John Fiske—became enamoured of the idea that the virtues of the English (hence the American) and German political systems owed their existence to the Teuton or Anglo-Saxon. Lovecraft read many of these writers and had their books in his library. With authorities like these, it is not surprising that he would echo their racial theories, even if in a particularly strident and pompous manner.

L. Sprague de Camp has maintained¹¹ that Lovecraft was significantly influenced by Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in German in 1899 and translated into English in 1911. But there is not a single reference to Chamberlain in any documents by Lovecraft that I have seen; and even a cursory examination of the specific tenets of Chamberlain’s racism shows that Lovecraft’s beliefs are very different. Chamberlain, according to one scholar, ‘set himself to reconcile Christianity, the religion of humility and forgiveness, with aggressive German nationalism’,¹² something Lovecraft never concerned himself about; indeed, Lovecraft’s anti-Christianity only gained force as he encountered Nietzsche around 1918. Chamberlain also praised the Teutonic barbarians who overthrow Rome, as being the bearers of ‘true Christianity’ (i.e., a ‘strong’ Christianity shorn of its elements of pity and tolerance), a view Lovecraft could never adopt given the belief he maintained to the end of his life that ‘To me the Roman Empire will always seem the central incident of human history’.¹³ In these and other ways did Lovecraft’s racism differ fundamentally from Chamberlain’s, so that any influence of the latter seems remote, especially given the total absence of documentary evidence that Lovecraft was even familiar with Chamberlain.

Later in 1915 the issue of blacks was raised again. We have already seen how Lovecraft attacked Charles D. Isaacson’s championing of Walt Whitman in his amateur paper In a Minor Key. The bulk of Isaacson’s paper, however, was a plea for racial tolerance, especially for blacks. He is particularly harsh on D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, asserting that it presented a false view of the relations between blacks and whites after the Civil War and that it incited racial hatred.

Lovecraft, in ‘In a Major Key’ ( Conservative, July 1915), makes the astounding claim that ‘Mr. Isaacson’s views on racial prejudice … are too subjective to be impartial’. In regard to The Birth of a Nation, Lovecraft states that he has not yet seen the film (he would do so later¹⁴), but says that he has read both the novel (The Clansman, 1905) by Thomas Dixon, Jr, and the dramatic adaptation of the novel on which the film was based. He then launches into a predictable paean to the Ku Klux Klan, ‘that noble but much maligned band of Southerners who saved half of our country from destruction at the close of the Civil War’. It is certainly odd that Lovecraft’s remarks were made at exactly the time when the Klan was being revived in the South by William J. Simmons, although it was not a force to be reckoned with until the 1920s. It can be pointed out here that Lovecraft is strangely silent on the thousands of lynchings of blacks throughout the early decades of the century; but he never mentions the KKK again until very late in life, and then he repudiates it.

As, however, with the pestiferous astrologer J. F. Hartmann, Lovecraft underestimated his opponent. The responses by both Isaacson and James Ferdinand Morton in the second issue of In a Minor Key (undated, but published in late 1915) are devastating, particularly Morton’s. James Ferdinand Morton (1870–1941) was a remarkable individual. He had gained a simultaneous B.A. and M.A. from Harvard in 1892, and became a vigorous advocate of black equality, free speech, the single tax, and secularism. He wrote many pamphlets on these subjects, most of them published either by himself or by The Truth Seeker Co. He had been President of the NAPA in 1896–97, and would later become President of the Thomas Paine Natural History Association and Vice President of the Esperanto Association of North America. He would end his career (1925–41) as Curator of the Paterson (New Jersey) Museum.

In ‘“Conservatism” Gone Mad’ Morton begins by stating presciently that ‘I presume that Mr. H. P. Lovecraft … is a rather young man, who will at some future day smile at the amusing dogmatism with which he now assumes to lay down the law.’ There then follows a broadside attacking Lovecraft’s racism, and a concluding prediction:

From the sample afforded in the paper under discussion it is evident that Mr. Lovecraft needs to serve a long and humble apprenticeship before he will become qualified to sit in the master’s seat and to thunder forth ex cathedra judgments. The one thing in his favor is his evident sincerity. Let him once come to realize the value of appreciating the many points of view shared by persons as sincere as he, and better informed in certain particulars, and he will become less narrow and intolerant. His vigor of style, when wedded to clearer conceptions based on a wider comprehension, will make him a writer of power.¹⁵ It is passages like this that led Lovecraft ultimately to make peace with Morton, who would then become one of his closest friends.

But that was several years in the future. At the moment Lovecraft had in mind no thought but a towering rebuttal. But the interesting thing is that no genuine rebuttal ever appeared. Lovecraft did write a magnificent satirical poem, ‘The IsaacsonioMortoniad’, around September 1915; but he did not allow it to be published, and there is no evidence that he even showed it to anyone. It is a splendid verse satire, as scintillating as some of the ‘Ad Criticos’ pieces.

Lovecraft did more than merely write about the war. On 16 May 1917, he himself applied for enlistment with the Rhode Island National Guard. What has not been observed by commentators is that this entire episode with the R.I.N.G. occurred before President Wilson’s signing of the draft bill (18 May 1917), and well before the institution of the draft itself. Lovecraft must have felt that, with the declaration of war in April, it was now appropriate for him to attempt to enter the hostilities himself as a matter of patriotic duty.

It is difficult to conceive of Lovecraft making this decision. He had been saying repeatedly since at least 1915 that he was an ‘invalid’ who could scarcely muster enough strength to get out of the house. But consider his most detailed account of his attempt at enlistment in the R.I.N.G.:

Some time ago, impressed by my entire uselessness in the world, I resolved to attempt enlistment despite my almost invalid condition. I argued that if I chose a regiment soon to depart for France; my sheer nervous force, which is not inconsiderable, might sustain me till a bullet or piece of shrapnel could more conclusively & effectively dispose of me. Accordingly I presented myself at the recruiting station of the R.I. National Guard & applied for entry into whichever unit should first proceed to the front. On account of my lack of technical or special training, I was told that I could not enter the Field Artillery, which leaves first; but was given a blank of application for the Coast Artillery, which will go after a short preliminary period of defence service at one of the forts of Narragansett Bay. The questions asked me were childishly inadequate, & so far as physical requirements are concerned, would have admitted a chronic invalid. The only diseases brought into discussion were specific ailments from which I had never suffered, & of some of which I had scarcely ever heard. The medical examination related only to major organic troubles, of which I have none, & I soon found myself (as I thought) a duly enrolled private in the 9th Co. R.I.N.G.!¹⁶

This tells us a number of important things. First, Lovecraft, if he had actually become a member of the R.I.N.G., would probably not have been sent overseas into actual combat, but instead would have been merely stationed near home (a later letter declares that the 9th Coast Artillery was stationed at Fort Standish in Boston Harbour¹⁷) in an auxiliary capacity. Second, Lovecraft took an actual physical examination which, however cursory, revealed no major physical ailments. If Lovecraft passed the examination, how was it that he was not serving in the R.I.N.G.? Let him tell the story:

As you may have deduced, I embarked upon this desperate venture without informing my mother; & as you may also have deduced, the sensation created at home was far from slight. In fact, my mother was almost prostrated with the news, since she knew that only by rare chance could a weakling like myself survive the rigorous routine of camp life. Her activities soon brought my military career to a close for the present. It required but a few words from our family physician regarding my nervous condition to annul the enlistment, though the army surgeon declared that such an annulment was highly unusual & almost against the regulations of the service … my final status is that of a man ‘Rejected for physical disability.’¹⁸

This account too is full of interest. One wonders what exactly Susie and Lovecraft’s physician told the R.I.N.G. officials. Some have speculated that the latter might have revealed the fact of Winfield Lovecraft’s paretic condition. The connection between paresis and syphilis had been established in 1911, and it is likely that both Susie and the physician now had a pretty good idea of the true cause of Winfield’s death. But the physical examination had presumably indicated that Lovecraft himself was not afflicted with paresis or syphilis, so it is not clear what effect the information about Winfield would have had. I think it is safer to concur with Lovecraft’s own testimony and assume that the physician’s account of Lovecraft’s ‘nervous condition’ caused the annulment.

Psychologically, Lovecraft confessed to a feeling of depression and disappointment: ‘I am feeling desolate and lonely indeed as a civilian. Practically all my personal acquaintances are now in some branch of the service, mostly Plattsburg or R.I.N.G. … it is disheartening to be the one non-combatant among a profusion of proud recruits.’¹⁹ Here was one more indication, for Lovecraft, of his being left behind in life: having failed to finish high school and enter college, he had seen his boyhood friends go on to gain good jobs in journalism, trade, and law enforcement. Now he saw them go off to war while he remained behind to write for the amateur press.

Lovecraft did in fact register for the draft on 5 June; indeed, he was legally obliged to do so. He gave his occupation as ‘Writer’. ‘I am told that it is possible I may be used even though I fail to pass the physical test for active military service.’²⁰ Clearly Lovecraft was not so used. His draft record, if it survives, has not come to light.

Another sociopolitical interest that emerged in the earliest part of Lovecraft’s amateur journalism phase was temperance. This had, indeed, been an enthusiasm of remarkably early development: so early as 1896 he had read a work by John B. Gough, Sunlight and Shadow (1880), on the subject. The fact that this volume was in the Phillips family library is by no means a surprise: recall that the town of Delavan, Illinois, was founded by Lovecraft’s maternal ancestors as a temperance town. We have seen that Whipple Phillips spent at least a year there as a young man in the 1850s.

Lovecraft himself did not get a chance to say anything in public on the subject until about 1915. About this time he discovered in the amateur world an ardent colleague in the fight against the demon rum—Andrew Francis Lockhart of Milbank, South Dakota. An article entitled ‘More Chain Lightning’ (United Official Quarterly, October 1915) is a paean to Lockhart’s efforts in the cause of temperance.

In spite of the fact that prohibition was very unpopular in Rhode Island, it is not at all surprising that Lovecraft would have become converted to temperance, for the movement had strong class- and race-conscious overtones; as one historian notes, it was led by ‘old stock, Protestant middle-class Americans’²¹ who were repelled by what they considered the excessive drinking habits of immigrants, particularly Germans and Italians.

One has to wonder why Lovecraft became so obsessed with temperance. He himself was fond of declaring that ‘I have never tasted intoxicating liquor, and never intend to’.²² When he remarks that ‘I am nauseated by even the distant stink of any alcoholic liquor’,²³ one is reminded of his extreme aversion to seafood, and cannot help wondering whether some event in infancy or boyhood triggered this severe physiological and psychological response. We know nothing of the drinking habits of Lovecraft’s immediate family; even for his father, whatever other sins he may have committed, we have no evidence of any inclination toward imbibing. It would, therefore, be irresponsible and unjust to make any conjectures on the subject. What must be said is that the cause of temperance is the only aspect of social reform for which Lovecraft showed any enthusiasm in his earlier years—an enthusiasm seemingly out of keeping with the ‘cosmic’ philosophy he had already evolved, which led him outwardly to maintain a perfect indifference to the fate of the ‘flyspeck-inhabiting lice’²⁴ on this globe.

Lovecraft himself claimed that among the great benefits he derived from amateurdom was the association of sympathetic and likeminded (or contrary-minded) individuals. For one who had been a virtual recluse during the 1908–13 period, amateur journalism allowed Lovecraft a gradual exposure to human society—initially in an indirect manner (via correspondence or discussions in amateur papers), then by direct contact. It would take several years for him to become comfortable as even a limited member of human society, but the transformation did indeed take place; and some of his early amateur associates remained for the rest of his life his closest friends.

Perhaps the three closest colleagues in Lovecraft’s early amateur period were Maurice W. Moe, Edward H. Cole, and Rheinhart Kleiner. Moe (1882–1940) was a high school teacher at Appleton High School in Appleton, Wisconsin (later at the West Division High School in Milwaukee) and one of the giants of the amateur world at the time, even though he held relatively few offices. His religious orthodoxy was a constant source of friction with Lovecraft, and it may have helped to develop and refine Lovecraft’s own hostility to religion. None of the withering polemics on religion to which Lovecraft treated Moe in his letters seems to have had any effect on their recipient.

Edward H. Cole (1892–1966) was also a well-respected amateur, but he was a staunch supporter of the NAPA and inflexibly hostile to the UAPA. He was Official Editor of the NAPA for 1911–12 and President for 1912–13. His journal, the Olympian, is one of the jewels of amateur literature in both contents and typography, even though it lapsed after 1917 and would not resume for two decades. Cole was one of the first amateurs, aside from the members of the Providence Amateur Press Club, whom Lovecraft met. He resided in various Boston suburbs, and attended a meeting of the club in North Providence in late November 1914. Cole became a close correspondent of Lovecraft, who in later years would always look him up when he went to Boston. In spite of his prejudice against the UAPA, Cole in 1917 married Helene E. Hoffman (who had been President of the UAPA in the 1913–14 term, the period when Lovecraft joined) and allowed himself to appear on the UAPA membership list. Lovecraft’s early letters to Cole are very stiff and formal, but eventually he unwinds and becomes less self-conscious.

Rheinhart Kleiner (1892–1949) of Brooklyn came in touch with Lovecraft when he received the first issue of the Conservative in late March 1915. An immediate and voluble correspondence sprang up, and Kleiner of course sent Lovecraft copies of his own sporadic amateur paper, the Piper. The two first met on 1 July 1916, when Kleiner and some others were passing through Providence on the way to the NAPA convention in Boston. Thereafter—especially when Lovecraft himself lived in Brooklyn in 1924–26—he and Kleiner would form a strong bond of friendship.

In the summer of 1916 Moe suggested to Lovecraft that a rotating correspondence cycle be formed amongst UAPA members. Lovecraft, already a voluminous correspondent, readily assented to the plan and suggested Kleiner as a third member. Moe suggested a fourth—Ira A. Cole, an amateur in Bazine, Kansas, and editor of the Plainsman. The correspondence cycle started up, under the name (invented by Moe) Kleicomolo, derived from the first syllables of the last names of each member. Each member would write a letter addressed to the other three. The idea at the outset was to rescue letter-writing as an art form from oblivion; whether or not the group succeeded, it certainly gave an impetus to Lovecraft’s own letter-writing and to the development of his philosophical thought.

In the meantime changes of some significance were occurring in Lovecraft’s family life. He had been living alone with his mother at 598 Angell Street since 1904: with his grandfather Whipple Phillips dead, his younger aunt Annie married and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his elder aunt Lillian married and living in Providence but some distance away, the atmosphere of 598 might well have been becoming somewhat claustrophobic. I have already noted Clara Hess describing the ‘strange and shutup air’ of the house at about this time.

Then, on 26 April 1915, after thirteen years of marriage to Lillian, Lovecraft’s uncle Franklin Chase Clark died at the age of sixty-seven. It is difficult to know how close Lovecraft was to Clark beyond his teenage years. We can certainly not gauge Lovecraft’s emotions about Dr Clark from his ‘Elegy on Franklin Chase Clark, M.D.’, which appeared in the Providence Evening News three days after his death, for a more wooden, lifeless, and mechanical poem would be difficult to find.

About a year and a half later, on the very last day of 1916, Lovecraft’s cousin Phillips Gamwell died of tuberculosis at the age of eighteen. Phillips, the only one of Annie E. Phillips Gamwell’s and Edward F. Gamwell’s children to survive beyond infancy, was the only male member of Lovecraft’s family of his own generation. Lovecraft’s various references to him make it clear that he was very fond of Phillips, even though he could have seen him only when he visited Cambridge or when Phillips came down to Providence. Lovecraft observes that about this time Phillips, then twelve years old, had ‘blossomed out as a piquant letter-writer eager to discuss the various literary and scientific topics broached during our occasional personal coversations’,²⁵ and Lovecraft attributes his fondness for letter-writing to four or five years’ correspondence with Phillips.

Annie had taken her son to Roswell, Colorado, in October 1916 for his health, but his tuberculosis had obviously advanced too far and he died there on 31 December 1916. Lovecraft’s ‘Elegy on Phillips Gamwell, Esq.’, published in the Providence Evening News for 5 January 1917, is as uninspired as his tribute to Dr Clark. After Phillips’s death, Annie returned to Providence, apparently living with her brother Edwin until his death on 14 November 1918 (and it is remarkable that Lovecraft says nothing about his death in any letters of the period or later), then probably in various rented quarters until early 1919, when she moved in with Lovecraft at 598 Angell Street.

Lovecraft, so far as I can tell, was not actually doing much during this period aside from writing; but he had discovered one entertaining form of relaxation—moviegoing. Lovecraft’s enthusiasm for the drama had waned by around 1910, the very time that film was emerging as a popular, if not an aesthetically distinguished, form of entertainment. By 1910 there were already five thousand nickleodeons throughout the country, even if these were regarded largely as entertainment for the working classes. Lovecraft reports that the first cinema shows in Providence were in March 1906; and, even though he ‘knew too much of literature & drama not to recognise the utter & unrelieved hokum of the moving picture’, he attended them anyway—’in the same spirit that I had read Nick Carter, Old King Brady, & Frank Reade in nickel-novel form’.²⁶ One develops the idea that watching films may have occupied some, perhaps much, of the ‘blank’ years of 1908–13, as a letter of 1915 suggests: ‘As you surmise, I am a devotee of the motion picture, since I can attend shows at any time, whereas my ill health seldom permits me to make definite engagements or purchase real theatre tickets in advance. Some modern films are really worth seeing, though when I first knew moving pictures their only value was to destroy time.’²⁷

When Rheinhart Kleiner wrote ‘To Mary of the Movies’ in the Piper for September 1915, Lovecraft immediately responded with ‘To Charlie of the Comics’ (Providence Amateur, February 1916). It is no surprise that the two poets chose to pay tribute to Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, as they were the first true ‘stars’ of the film industry. Lovecraft’s undistinguished poem is notable only for its relative modernity of subject and style and its use of octosyllabic quatrains. Lovecraft clearly had a fondness for Chaplin, remarking: ‘Chaplin is infinitely amusing—too good for the rather vulgar films he used to appear in—and I hope he will in future be an exponent of more refined comedy.’²⁸

For three years Lovecraft had written reams of essays, poems, and reviews of amateur papers. Would he ever resume the fiction writing that had showed such promise up to 1908? In 1915 Lovecraft wrote to G. W. Macauley: ‘I wish that I could write fiction, but it seems almost an impossibility.’²⁹ Macauley claims that he ‘violently disagreed’—not because he had actually seen any of Lovecraft’s fiction but because, having sent a story to Lovecraft for comment, he had received such an acute and elaborate analysis that he became convinced that Lovecraft had the short-story writing faculty within him. Criticism of fiction and fiction-writing are, of course, two different things, but in Lovecraft’s case one cannot help feeling that the frequency with which he remarks on the failings of stories published in the amateur press points to a growing urge to prove that he can do better. Fiction was, of course, always the weakest point in the amateur press, not only because it is generally harder to master than prose nonfiction but because the space limitations in amateur papers did not allow the publication of much beyond sketches or vignettes.

Lovecraft finally allowed ‘The Alchemist’ to be printed in the United Amateur for November 1916. It was to be expected that he would himself attack it in the ‘Department of Public Criticism’ (United Amateur, May 1917), saying that ‘we must needs beg all the charitable indulgence the Association can extend to an humble though ambitious tyro’. The single word ‘ambitious’ may suggest Lovecraft’s desire to write more fiction if this one specimen, however much he may deprecate it himself, receives favourable notice. It appears to have done just that, but even so it would still be more than half a year before Lovecraft would break his selfimposed nine-year ban on fiction-writing. That he finally did so, writing ‘The Tomb’ and ‘Dagon’ in quick succession in the summer of 1917, can be attributed in large part to the encouragement of a new associate, W. Paul Cook of Athol, Massachusetts, who would be a significant presence throughout the rest of Lovecraft’s life.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Feverish and Incessant Scribbling (1917–19)

W. Paul Cook (1881–1948) had long been a giant in the amateur world. Cook was unmistakably a New Englander: he had been born in Vermont; he was a direct descendant of the colonial governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire; and he resided for much of his adult life in Athol, Massachusetts. For years he was the head of the printing department of the Athol Transcript, and his access to printing equipment and his devotion to the amateur cause permitted him to be a remarkable philanthropist in printing amateur journals virtually at cost. He began printing The Conservative in 1917. During his term as President of the UAPA Lovecraft appointed Cook Official Printer, a position he held for three consecutive years (1917–20) and again for three more years in 1922–25. Curiously, at the same time he served as Official Editor of the NAPA (1918–19) and its President (1919–20).

Cook was one of the few amateurs who had a strong taste in weird fiction; Lovecraft would later admit that Cook’s ‘library was the most remarkable collection of fantastic & other material that I have ever seen assembled in one place’,¹ and he would frequently borrow many rare books to which he himself did not have access. It is scarcely to be doubted that Cook, during his visit with Lovecraft in September 1917 (for which see further below), discussed this topic of mutual interest. Whether at this time he convinced Lovecraft to let him print his other juvenile tale, ‘The Beast in the Cave’, is not clear; at any rate, that story appeared in Cook’s Vagrant (a NAPA paper) for June 1918.

Lovecraft makes it very clear that Cook’s encouragement was instrumental in his resumption of weird writing; and this encouragement was both private and public. One instance of the latter is Cook’s effusive article entitled ‘Howard P. Lovecraft’s Fiction’, prefacing his printing of ‘Dagon’ in the Vagrant for November 1919, a perspicacious piece of work even though it conjectures that Lovecraft may have been influenced by Maupassant, whom he had probably not read by this time.

Poe, of course, is the dominant influence on Lovecraft’s early tales, and looms large over the bulk of Lovecraft’s fiction up to at least 1923. And yet, even ‘The Tomb’ and ‘The Outsider’ (1921), Lovecraft’s most obviously Poe-esque tales, are far from being mere pastiches; but it is evident that Lovecraft found in Poe a model both in style and in overall short-story construction.

In particular, the idiom Lovecraft evolved in his early tales— dense, a little overheated, laced with archaic and recondite terms, almost wholly lacking in ‘realistic’ character portrayal, and almost entirely given over to exposition and narration, with a nearcomplete absence of dialogue—is clearly derived from Poe. So much did Lovecraft customarily acknowledge the Poe influence that he would sometimes exaggerate it, as in his famous lament of 1929: ‘There are my “Poe” pieces & my “Dunsany” pieces—but alas—where are any “Lovecraft” pieces?’²

The most obvious stylistic feature common to both Poe and Lovecraft is the use of adjectives. In Lovecraft’s case this has been derisively termed ‘adjectivitis’, as if there is some canonical number of adjectives per square inch that is permissible and the slightest excess is cause for frenzied condemnation. But this sort of criticism is merely a holdover from an outmoded and superficial realism that vaunted the barebones style of a Hemingway or a Sherwood Anderson as the sole acceptable model for English prose. Lovecraft was predominantly influenced by the ‘Asianic’ style of Johnson and Gibbon as opposed to the ‘Attic’ style of Swift and Addison; and few nowadays—especially now that such writers as Thomas Pynchon and Gore Vidal have restored richness of texture to modern English fiction—will condemn Lovecraft without a hearing for the use of such a style.

Nevertheless, I think a case could be made that Lovecraft spent the better part of his fictional career in attempting to escape—or, at best, to master or refine—the stylistic influence of Poe, as is suggested by his frequent remarks in the last decade of his life on the need for simplicity of expression and his exemplification of this principle in the evolution of his later ‘scientific’ manner.

The tales of Lovecraft’s early period do not require much analysis; on the whole, they are relatively conventional, showing only hints of the dynamic conceptions that would infuse his later work. Some of the tales are more interesting for their genesis than for their actual content. ‘The Tomb’, written in the summer of 1917, tells the story of Jervas Dudley, a ‘dreamer and a visionary’ who appears to be possessed by the spirit of his eighteenth-century ancestor. It was inspired by Lovecraft’s stroll in Swan Point Cemetery in June, in the company of his aunt Lillian. They had come upon a tombstone dating to 1711, causing Lovecraft to ponder: ‘Here was a link with my favourite aera of periwigs … Why could I not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age? What had left his body, that it could no longer converse with me?’³

‘Polaris’, written in the summer of 1918, strikingly anticipates Lovecraft’s later ‘Dunsanian’ tales, but was written a full year before he ever read Lord Dunsany. The story was inspired by a dream occurring in late spring of that year, when Lovecraft saw himself hovering as a disembodied intelligence over ‘a strange city—a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills’.⁴

Most curious of all, ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’ (1919), depicting the psychic possession of a backwoods denizen of the Catskill Mountains region of New York state by some cosmic entity, was inspired by a newspaper article in the New York Tribune about the State Constabulary’s encounter with just such denizens in that region.⁵ This article appeared on 27 April 1919, and actually mentions a backwoods family named Slater or Slahter, the exact character name used by Lovecraft in his story.

‘Dagon’, the second tale of Lovecraft’s maturity, is of interest chiefly for its contemporaneousness of setting (we are clearly in the midst of the First World War) and for its suggestion of an entire alien civilization that had once dwelt literally on the underside of the world. It is a theme that Lovecraft would develop exhaustively in his later work.

In this period Lovecraft also learned to express weird conceptions in verse. Whereas up to 1917 his poetry had been wholly Georgian in character, Lovecraft now began to see that poetry could do more than merely recapture the atmosphere of the eighteenth century. The dominant influence on his early weird verse is, of course, Poe; for although Lovecraft owned and read the ‘Graveyard Poets’ of the later eighteenth century—James Hervey’s Meditations and Contemplations (1746–47), Edward Young’s NightThoughts (1742–45), among others—they do not appear to have influenced him appreciably. Probably the most notable piece of work is is a 302-line poem written some time in 1916, ‘The Poe-et’s Nightmare’, the central section of which expresses some tremendous cosmic conceptions in Miltonic blank verse. Another long weird poem—the 312-line ‘Psychopompos’, begun in the fall of 1917 but not completed until May or June of 1918—is interesting in adopting a kind of ballad narrative form akin to that employed by Sir Walter Scott. Many other poems unfortunately tend, however, toward stock images or contrived shudders. Even Lovecraft’s most famous early weird poem, ‘Nemesis’ (written in the ‘sinister small hours of the black morning after Hallowe’en’ of 1917⁶), is open to the charge of vagueness and empty horrific imagery.

Meanwhile political events were not failing to attract Lovecraft’s attention. Even if he could not himself serve in the Great War, he could at least closely follow the course of that conflict—especially the United States’ belated entry into it. Lovecraft predictably wrote a number of poems commemorating the United States’ joining of her ‘mother’ England to battle Germany or more generally urging on the British soldiers. A number of these poems were reprinted in the National Enquirer. None of them amounts to anything.

In terms of the actual progress of the war, Lovecraft remarks in late 1917: ‘As to the general situation, it seems very discouraging just now. It may take a second war to adjust things properly.’⁷ This comment—seemingly but unwittingly prophetic—was made at the lowest point of the war for the Allies: the Germans were making considerable headway and seemed on the brink of winning the war before the new American forces could be mobilized. It is therefore possible that Lovecraft was actually conceiving the possibility of a victory for the Germans, so that the ‘second war’ would be one required to restore national borders to the pre-1914 state. Curiously enough, I cannot find any remark by Lovecraft on the actual end of the war; but this may only be because many letters of the 1918–19 period have probably been lost or destroyed.

Lovecraft’s ponderous essay, ‘The League’ ( Conservative, July 1919)—a cynical meditation on the uselessness of the League of Nations, or any other international body, to prevent war—shows that he was paying considerable attention to the peace conference at Versailles. Lovecraft no doubt gained tremendous satisfaction that the United States in early 1920 failed to ratify American entry into the League, the brainchild of the hated President Wilson. He predictably accepted the anti-Communist paranoia of the ‘Red Scare’ of the postwar period in the essay ‘Bolshevism’ (Conservative, July 1919), speaking of the ‘noxious example of the almost subhuman Russian rabble’. More distinctly allied to his racism is the essay ‘Americanism’ (United Amateur, July 1919). For Lovecraft, Americanism is nothing more than ‘expanded Anglo-Saxondom’; accordingly, the notion of a ‘melting-pot’ is rejected summarily:

Most dangerous and fallacious of the several misconceptions of Americanism is that of the so-called ‘melting-pot’ of races and traditions. It is true that this country has received a vast influx of non-English immigrants who come hither to enjoy without hardship the liberties which our British ancestors carved out in toil and bloodshed. It is also true that such of them as belong to the Teutonic and Celtic races are capable of assimilation to our English types and of becoming valuable acquisitions to the population. But from this it does not follow that a mixture of really alien blood or ideas has accomplished or can accomplish anything but harm … Immigration cannot, perhaps, be cut off altogether, but it should be understood that aliens who choose America as their residence must accept the prevailing language and culture as their own; and neither try to modify our institutions, nor to keep alive their own in our midst.

This statement, offensive as it may be to many, was not in any way unusual amongst Yankees of Lovecraft’s class. Let us bypass the flagrant untruth that immigrants have somehow come merely to enjoy the ‘liberties’ carved out by those sturdy Saxons: again Lovecraft’s complete ignorance of the hardships willingly endured by immigrants to establish themselves in the United States has betrayed him into clownish error. The critical term here is ‘assimilation’—the idea that foreign culture-streams should shed their own cultural heritage and adopt that of the prevailing (AngloSaxon) civilization. In Lovecraft’s time it was expected that immigrants would ‘assimilate’; as one modern historian has noted: ‘The predominant expectation [in the early twentieth century] has been that the newcomer, no matter what his place of origin, would conform to Anglo-Saxon patterns of behavior.’⁸ Lovecraft, although on the far right in his views on the First World War and on the League of Nations, was a centrist in the matter of immigrant assimilation.

I have no doubt that Lovecraft approved of the three important immigration restriction laws of the period: those of 1917 (which introduced a literacy test), of 1921 (which limited immigration from Europe, Australia, the Near East, and Africa to 3 per cent of each foreign nation’s population then residing in the United States), and, most significantly, of 1924 (reducing the quota to 2 per cent, but taking as its basis the census of 1890, which had the added effect of radically reducing immigration from eastern and southern Europe, since immigrants from those countries were an insignificant number in 1890). Lovecraft does not mention any of these immigration laws, but his general silence on the matter of foreign incursions in the 1920s (except during his New York period) suggests that he felt this matter had been, at least for the time being, satisfactorily dealt with. Politics during the relatively tranquil and Republican-governed 1920s becomes for Lovecraft less a matter of immediate crises than an opportunity for theoretical speculation. It was during this time that he evolved his notions of aristocracy and ‘civilization’, ideas that would undergo significant modification with the onset of the Depression but retain their fundamental outlines, leading to his piquant evolution of ‘fascistic socialism’.

The late 1910s saw Lovecraft emerge as a towering figure in the tiny world of amateur journalism. Having been elected President for the 1917–18 term, Lovecraft seemed in a good position to carry out his programme for a UAPA that would both promote pure literature and serve as a tool for education. Under the capable official editorship of Verna McGeoch (pronounced Ma-GOO), who held the office for two consecutive terms (1917–19), the United Amateur really did flower into a substantial literary organ.

One idea Lovecraft put forward to encourage amateur activity was the issuing of co-operative papers—papers in which a number of individuals would pool their resources, both financial and literary. He attempted to teach by example by participating in such a journal, The United Co-operative, which published three issues: December 1918, June 1919, and April 1921. Lovecraft had contributions in each issue. Winifred Jackson—with whom Lovecraft had earlier collaborated on two mediocre short stories, ‘The Green Meadow’ and ‘The Crawling Chaos’—was also one of the cooperative editors.

When Lovecraft’s term as President expired in the summer of 1918, he was appointed to his old job of Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism by the new president, Rheinhart Kleiner. For the 1919–20 term Lovecraft held no office. In the summer of 1920, however, he was elected Official Editor, serving for four of the next five years. He was now in still greater control of the editorial content of the United Amateur, and he made the most of it, opening its pages to literary matter by many of his colleagues old and new. Moreover, he wrote editorials for nearly every issue and was also in charge of writing ‘News Notes’ recounting comings and goings of various amateurs, including himself.

The rumblings of discontent from some members became more emphatic around this time. By November 1920 he was having to respond to accusations of ‘excessive centralisation of authority’ (‘Editorial’, United Amateur, November 1920). It is true that for the period 1917-22 a relatively small number of people held office in the UAPA; but it seems as if a certain apathy had set in amongst UAPA members whereby they were content to have these individuals continue holding office year in and year out. Individual papers were declining, and Lovecraft’s own Conservative, because of his other official involvements, appeared only annually in 1918 and 1919, and then ceased altogether until 1923.

But there is also evidence that Lovecraft himself, if not his colleagues, was beginning to conduct himself in a sort of fascistic way. Perhaps irritated at the slowness of the progress in literary development on the part of most members, he increasingly called for improvement by main force. In a lecture entitled ‘Amateur Journalism: Its Possible Needs and Betterment’ (delivered at an amateur convention in Boston on 5 September 1920), he proposes establishing ‘some centralised authority capable of exerting a kindly, reliable, and more or less invisible guidance in matters aesthetic and artistic’. Lovecraft anticipates the objections of ‘any idealistic and ultra-conscientious person’ who might object to the plan’s ‘possible oligarchical tendencies’ by pointing to the fact that all great periods in literature—Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, eighteenth-century England—were led by ‘dominant coteries’. It is evident that Lovecraft has simply reached the limit of his patience with sporting pages, bad poetry, and unhelpful official criticism. It is needless to say that the plan was never adopted.

Lovecraft must, however, have been taken aback when the October 1921 Woodbee contained an attack upon him by Leo Fritter, a long-time UAPA member whom Lovecraft himself had supported for president in 1915. Fritter had cited a ‘wide-spreading dissatisfaction’ with Lovecraft’s editorial policy in the United Amateur and went on to accuse Lovecraft of trying to force the members into a mould he had arbitrarily cast according to his own ideas. Lovecraft attempted to counter that he himself had received ‘numerous and enthusiastic assurances of an opposite nature’ (‘Editorial’, United Amateur, September 1921). When Lovecraft concluded that ‘The question is one which should ultimately be decided at the polls’, he spoke better than he knew, as we shall see presently.

This period, however, saw Lovecraft evolving socially from an extreme misfit to one who, while by no means gregarious, could take his place in the society of congenial individuals. This transformation, as successive waves of friends—most of them amateurs —came to visit him or as he actually ventured forth on brief excursions, is heart-warming to see.

Two visits by amateurs occurring in 1917 are instructive by their very contrast. In mid-September 1917 W. Paul Cook, who had only recently become acquainted with Lovecraft, paid him a call in Providence. Cook tells the story piquantly:

The first time I met Howard I came very near not meeting him … I was bound from New York to Boston, and broke my trip in Providence purposely to see Lovecraft. I was traveling by train, which enabled me to announce in advance the time of my arrival and with a variation of only a few minutes. Arriving at the address on Angell street which later was to be the best known street address in Amateur journalism, I was met at the door by Howard’s mother and aunt. Howard had been up all night studying and writing, had just now gone to bed, and must under no circumstances be disturbed. If I would go to the Crown hotel, register, get a room and wait, they would telephone when, and if, Howard woke up. This was one of the occasions in my life when I have blessed the gods for giving me a sense of humor, however perverted. It was essential that I be in Boston early that evening, which allowed me about three hours in Providence, but there was a train leaving in half an hour which I could catch if I kept moving. I had a life-like picture of myself hanging around Providence until His Majesty was ready to receive me! In later years Mrs. Clark and I laughed more than once in recalling the incident. I was part way to the sidewalk and the door was almost latched when Howard appeared in dressing gown and slippers. Wasn’t that W. Paul Cook and didn’t they understand that he was to see me immediately on my arrival? I was almost forcibly ushered by the guardians of the gate and into Howard’s study.⁹

Cook’s account of the three hours spent with Lovecraft—they mostly talked amateur journalism, naturally enough—is unremarkable save in one detail I shall consider later. Lovecraft’s account of the meeting is recorded in a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner:

Just a week ago I enjoyed the honour of a personal call from Mr. W. Paul Cook … I was rather surprised at his appearance, for he is rather more rustic & carelessly groomed than I had expected of a man of his celebrity to be. In fact, his antique derby hat, unpressed garments, frayed cravat, yellowish collar, ill-brushed hair, & none too immaculate hands made me think of my old friend Sam Johnson … But Cook’s conversation makes up for whatever outward deficiencies he may possess.¹⁰

Before examining these accounts, let us now turn to Rheinhart Kleiner’s meeting with Lovecraft, which also occurred some time in 1917—presumably after Cook’s visit. Kleiner tells the story as follows: ‘I was greeted at the door of 598 Angell Street by his mother, who was a woman just a little below medium height, with graying hair, and eyes which seemed to be the chief point of resemblance between herself and her son. She was very cordial and even vivacious, and in another moment had ushered me into Lovecraft’s room.’¹¹

Why the very different responses by his mother to Cook and Kleiner? I believe that the overriding factor is social snobbery. Cook’s unkempt appearance could not have sat well with either Susie or Lillian, and they were manifestly going to make it as difficult as possible for Cook to pass through their door. Lovecraft confesses in a candid moment that ‘Of amateurdom in general her [Susie’s] opinion was not high, for she had a certain aesthetic hypersensitiveness which made its crudenesses very obvious and very annoying to her’.¹² Elsewhere he goes on to admit that Lillian also did not care for amateurdom—’an institution whose extreme democracy and occasional heterogeneity have at times made it necessary for me to apologise for it’.¹³ If these were the reasons why Lillian did not like amateurdom, then it is very clear that social considerations weighed heavily in her mind: ‘democracy and occasional heterogeneity’ can scarcely stand for anything but the fact that people of all classes and educational backgrounds were involved in the amateur movement. Kleiner, a polished and debonair Brooklynite, was cordially received because his social standing was, in Susie’s eyes, at least equal to Lovecraft’s.

These accounts are among the most illuminating as to Lovecraft’s life—and his relations with his mother—in this period. Both Cook and Kleiner are united on the extreme solicitude exercised by Susie and Lillian over Lovecraft. Cook notes: ‘Every few minutes Howard’s mother or his aunt, or both, peeped into the room to see if he had fainted or shown signs of strain.’ Kleiner tells a more remarkable story: ‘I noticed that at every hour or so his mother appeared in the doorway with a glass of milk, and Lovecraft forthwith drank it.’ It is this constant babying of Lovecraft by Susie and Lillian that no doubt helped to foster in Lovecraft’s own mind a sense of his ‘invalidism’.

Kleiner suggested that they go out for a stroll, and Lovecraft took him to see the colonial antiquities of Providence—a tour he invariably gave to all his out-of-town guests, for he never tired of showing off the wondrous remains of the eighteenth century in his native city. But Lovecraft’s unfamiliarity with normal social conduct is made evident when Kleiner states:

On our way back to his home, and while we were still downtown, I suggested stopping in at a cafeteria for a cup of coffee. He agreed, but took milk himself, and watched me dispose of coffee and cake, or possibly pie, with some curiosity. It occurred to me later that this visit to a public eating-house—a most unpretentious one—might have been a distinct departure from his own usual habits.

This is very likely to be the case: not only because of the family’s dwindling finances, but because of Lovecraft’s continuing hermitry in spite of his ever-growing correspondence, a trip to a restaurant was at this time not likely to have been a common occurrence.

That correspondence, however, did lead at this time to Lovecraft’s contact with two individuals, each remarkable in their own way, who would become lifelong friends—Samuel Loveman and Alfred Galpin. Loveman (1887–1976)—a friend of three of the most distinctive writers in American literature (Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, and H. P. Lovecraft) and also well acquainted with George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith—appears to be merely a sort of hanger-on to the great. But he was himself an accomplished poet—a greater poet than any in the Lovecraft circle except, perhaps, Clark Ashton Smith, and vastly superior to Lovecraft himself. His infrequently issued amateur journal, The Saturnian, contained his own exquisite, neo-Grecian, fin-de-siècle poems as well as translations from Baudelaire and Heine; and he scattered his poetry in other amateur or little magazines with insouciance. His greatest work is a long poem, The Hermaphrodite (written perhaps in the late teens and published in 1926 by W. Paul Cook), a gorgeous evocation of the spirit of classical Greece.

Lovecraft came in direct contact with Loveman in 1917. Loveman was at this time stationed at an army base, Camp Gordon, in Georgia, where he was in Company H of the 4th Infantry, Replacement Regiment. According to the UAPA membership lists, he remained there until the middle of 1919, when he returned to his native Cleveland. Loveman had, however, been out of organized amateurdom for some years, and he attests that Lovecraft’s first letter was essentially a query as to whether Loveman was in fact still in the land of the living.¹⁴ Loveman, finding the antique diction of the letter both charming and faintly ridiculous, duly relieved Lovecraft’s doubts on this score. For several years their association was largely conducted on paper, but in 1922 they met in Cleveland and then, in 1924–26, they became close friends in New York.

Alfred Galpin (1901–83) is an entirely different case. This brilliant individual—as gifted in pure intellect as Loveman was in aesthetic sensitivity—would eventually become a philosopher, composer, and teacher of French, although perhaps his rapid alterations in intellectual aspirations prevented him from distinguishing himself in any one of them. Galpin first came to Lovecraft’s attention in late 1917, when he was appointed to the new position of 4th Vice-President, in charge of recruiting high-school students into amateurdom. This appointment was very likely suggested by Maurice W. Moe, since Galpin was at that time already emerging as a star pupil in the Appleton (Wis.) High School and specifically in Moe’s Appleton High School Press Club. By January 1918, the date of the first surviving letter by Lovecraft to Galpin, the two were already cordial correspondents.

Galpin’s most profound effect upon Lovecraft may have been philosophical, for as early as August 1918 Lovecraft is announcing that Galpin’s ‘system of philosophy … comes nearest to my own beliefs of any system I have ever known’, and in 1921:

he is intellectually exactly like me save in degree. In degree he is immensely my superior—he is what I should like to be but have not brains enough to be. Our minds are cast in precisely the same mould, save that his is finer. He alone can grasp the direction of my thoughts and amplify them. And so we go down the dark ways of knowledge; the poor plodding old man, and ahead of him the alert little link-boy holding the light and pointing out the path.¹⁵

This obviously is meant half in jest, although Lovecraft clearly believes there is more than a grain of truth to it; and perhaps Galpin did indeed help to give shape to Lovecraft’s still nebulous philosophical conceptions, helping this ‘old man’ of thirty-one to hone his mechanistic materialism. But it is not that that I wish to study here; rather, Galpin had a more immediate effect upon Lovecraft’s literary work, and it involved the production of some delightfully playful poetry.

Lovecraft of course wrote some more or less conventional tributes to Galpin, especially on his birthday. Galpin appears to have had amorous inclinations toward various girls in his high school, and Lovecraft has great fun with the whole subject, especially in such poems as ‘Damon and Delia, a Pastoral’ (Tryout, August 1918), ‘To Delia, Avoiding Damon’ (Tryout, September 1918), ‘Damon—a Monody’ (United Amateur, May 1919), and perhaps ‘Hylas and Myrrha’ (Tryout, May 1919) and ‘Myrrha and Strephon’ (Tryout, July 1919), if these latter two are in fact about Galpin. Damon in these poems is clearly Galpin; the name is derived from the shepherd who is featured in the eighth eclogue of Virgil. Many of these poems are very amusing, and some of the best of Lovecraft’s parodic love poetry is found in letters to Galpin.

Lovecraft’s final word on Galpin’s schoolboy crushes occurs in the delightful two-act play in pentameter blank verse entitled Alfredo: A Tragedy, the manuscript of which declares it to be ‘By Beaumont and Fletcher’ and which is dated 14 September 1918. This date makes it clear that two of the chief characters—Rinarto, King of Castile and Aragon, and Alfredo, the Prince Regent—are meant to be Kleiner and Galpin, since Kleiner was president of the UAPA and Galpin was 1st vice-president during the 1918–19 term. Other obviously recognizable characters are Mauricio (= Maurice W. Moe), a cardinal, and Teobaldo (= Lovecraft), the prime minister.

I don’t know that we need read a great deal into all these mocklove poems about Galpin: certainly Lovecraft’s beloved Georgians had made a specialty of it, and The Rape of the Lock is only the bestknown example. But by consistently deflating the emotion of love in these and other poems, Lovecraft may be shielding himself from falling under its influence. The probability that he would so fall was, at the moment, comparatively small, but he was not taking any chances. During his involvement with the Providence Amateur Press Club in 1914–16 a few of the members decided to play a rather malicious joke on him by having one of the female members call him up and ask him to take her out on a date. Lovecraft stated soberly, ‘I’ll have to ask my mother’, and of course nothing came of the matter.¹⁶ In a letter to Galpin Lovecraft notes in passing that ‘so far as I know, no feminine freak ever took the trouble to note or recognise my colossal and transcendent intellect’.¹⁷ Whether this was exactly true or not is something I shall take up later.

Although amateur journalism was still the focal point of Lovecraft’s world, he was slowly—probably from his mother’s urging—making tentative forays at professional employment. His scorn of commercial writing prevented him from submitting his work to paying magazines, and the small number of his poems that were reprinted in the National Magazine all saw prior publication in amateur journals, and moreover were presumably not sent in by Lovecraft but were selected by the editors of the magazine itself from an examination of amateur papers. But if Lovecraft was not at the moment inclined to make money by writing, in what way could he earn an income? Whipple Phillips’s inheritance, some of it already squandered by bad investments, was slowly but inexorably diminishing; even Lovecraft probably saw that he could not indulge himself as a gentleman-author forever.

The first sign we have that Lovecraft was actually attempting to earn an income occurs in a letter to John T. Dunn in October 1916. In explaining why he is unable to participate as thoroughly in amateur affairs as he would like, Lovecraft states: ‘Many of my present duties are outside the association, in connexion with the Symphony Literary Service, which is now handling a goodly amount of verse.’¹⁸ This was a revisory or ghostwriting service featuring Lovecraft, Anne Tillery Renshaw (who edited the amateur journal The Symphony), and Mrs J. G. Smith, a colleague of Renshaw’s (although not in the UAPA), both of whom lived at this time in Coffeeville, Mississippi. It does not appear that this service, as such, was in business for very long.

This is the first indication that Lovecraft had commenced what would become his only true remunerative occupation: revising and ghostwriting. He never managed to turn this occupation into anything like a regular source of income, as he generally took on jobs only from colleagues and very sporadically placed advertisements for his services. In many senses it was exactly the wrong job for him in terms of his creative work: first, it was too similar in nature to his fiction-writing, so that it frequently left him too physically and mentally drained to attempt work of his own; and second, the very low rates he charged, and the unusual amount of effort he would put into some jobs, netted him far less money than a comparable amount of work in some other profession would have done.

What of Lovecraft and his family at this time? We have seen that aunt Lillian, upon the death of her husband Franklin Chase Clark in 1915, lived in various rented quarters in the city. W. Paul Cook’s account of his visit in 1917 makes it clear that she spent considerable time with her sister and nephew. Aunt Annie, upon her separation from Edward F. Gamwell (whenever that might have been) and the death of her son Phillips at the end of 1916, returned from Cambridge and probably lived with her brother Edwin in Providence. The death of Edwin E. Phillips on 14 November 1918 passes entirely unnoticed in the surviving correspondence by Lovecraft that I have seen. Letters from this period are admittedly few, but the silence is none the less significant.

Meanwhile Lovecraft himself, as he had been doing since 1904, continued to live alone with his mother at 598 Angell Street. The nature of their relations for much of the period 1904–19 is a mystery. All in all, they could not have been very wholesome. Lovecraft was still doing almost no travelling outside the city, and the lack of a regular office job must have kept him at home nearly all day, week after week. And yet, Clara Hess, their neighbour of twenty-five years, remarks disturbingly: ‘In looking back, I cannot ever remember to have seen Mrs. Lovecraft and her son together. I never heard one speak to the other. It probably just happened that way, but it does seem rather strange.’¹⁹

Then, in May 1917, came Lovecraft’s attempt at enlistment in the R.I.N.G. and, later, in the regular army. We have seen how Susie put a stop to the first of these efforts by pulling strings. Lovecraft’s comment that ‘If I had realised to the full how much she would suffer through my enlistment, I should have been less eager to attempt it’²⁰ reveals a staggering failure of communication and empathy between mother and son. Susie must have been aware of Lovecraft’s militarism and his eagerness to see the United States enter the war on England’s side; but she must genuinely have been caught off guard at this attempt at enlistment—which, let us recall, came before President Wilson’s announcement of the resumption of the draft.

Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, is surely correct in noting that ‘Susie’s sharp decline … seems to have begun at about the time of her brother’s death’²¹ in November 1918. Edwin was the closest surviving male member of Susie’s generation. From now on, Susie, Lillian, and Annie were all wholly reliant on Whipple Phillips’s and (in the case of Lillian) Franklin C. Clark’s estates for their income. (Since Annie never formally divorced her husband, Edward F. Gamwell, it is not clear whether she received any financial support from him; I think it unlikely.) Lovecraft was the only viable wage-earner in the family, and he was clearly not doing much to support himself, let alone his mother and aunts.

The result, for Susie, was perhaps inevitable. In the winter of 1918–19 she finally cracked under the strain of financial worries. On 18 January 1919 Lovecraft writes to Kleiner: ‘My mother, feeling no better here, has gone on a visit to my elder aunt for purposes of complete rest; leaving my younger aunt as autocrat of this dwelling.’²² On 13 March, Susie, ‘showing no signs of recovery’,²³ was admitted to Butler Hospital, where her husband had died more than twenty years before and where she herself would remain until her death two years later.

Lovecraft notes in his January letter to Kleiner that ‘such infirmity & absence on her part is so unprecedented’, but one wonders whether this was really the case. Once again Clara Hess provides some very disturbing testimony:

I remember that Mrs. Lovecraft spoke to me about weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark, and that she shivered and looked about apprehensively as she told her story.

The last time I saw Mrs. Lovecraft we were both going ‘down street’ on the Butler Avenue car. She was excited and apparently did not know where she was. She attracted the attention of everyone. I was greatly embarrassed, as I was the object of all her attention.²⁴

I believe that these incidents occurred just before Susie’s breakdown. Again, if Lovecraft was oblivious of Susie’s gradual decline, he must have had very little close or meaningful contact with his mother. And yet, Lovecraft himself was profoundly shaken by Susie’s nervous collapse. In the January letter to Kleiner he writes:

you above all others can imagine the effect of maternal illness & absence. I cannot eat, nor can I stay up long at a time. Penwriting or typewriting nearly drives me insane. My nervous system seems to find its vent in feverish & incessant scribbling with a pencil … She writes optimistic letters each day, & I try to make my replies equally optimistic; though I do not find it possible to ‘cheer up’, eat, & go out, as she encourages me to do.

It is obvious that Lovecraft felt very close to his mother, however much he may have failed to understand her or she to understand him. I have no warrant for saying that his response to her illness is pathological; rather, I see it as part of a pattern whereby any serious alteration in his familial environment leads to extreme nervous disturbance. The death of his grandmother in 1896 led to dreams of ‘night-gaunts’; the death of his father in 1898 brought on some sort of ‘near-breakdown’; the death of Whipple Phillips and the loss of his birthplace in 1904 caused Lovecraft seriously to consider suicide. Even less tragic events resulted in severe traumas: school attendance in 1898–99 and violin lessons produced another ‘nearbreakdown’; yet another breakdown caused or was caused by his inability to complete high school, and led to a several-year period of vegetation and hermitry.

The state of Lovecraft’s own health during this entire period is somewhat of a mystery, since we have only his own testimony on the matter. He obviously had no physical ailments: his R.I.N.G. examination, however cursory, was clear on that score. To Arthur Harris, Lovecraft makes the remarkable assertion in 1915: ‘I can remain out of bed but three or four hours each day, and those three or four hours are generally burdened with an array of amateur work far beyond my capabilities.’²⁵ His letters to John Dunn and Alfred Galpin of the period 1915–18 are full of references to his pseudo-invalidism. Clearly, Lovecraft’s ailments were largely psychological—perhaps fostered, as I have noted before, by his mother’s and his aunts’ oversolicitousness; whenever he became engrossed in some intellectual subject, his ‘ill health’ would be sloughed off and he would pursue studies as vigorously as anyone. It is perhaps not too early to bring in the testimony of a relatively impartial witness, George Julian Houtain, who met Lovecraft in Boston in 1920:

Lovecraft honestly believes he is not strong—that he has an inherited nervousness and fatigue wished upon him. One would never suspect in his massive form and well constructed body that there could be any ailment. To look at him one would think seriously before ‘squaring off.’ o ph

Many of us are Lovecrafts, in the peculiar sense, that we have lots of things wished upon us—and are ignorant how to throw them off. We react always to the suggestion—shall I call it curse?—placed upon us. It was never intended in the great scheme of things that such a magnificent physique should succumb to any mental dictation that commanded it to be subject to nervous ills and fatigue—nor that that wonderful mentality should weakly and childishly listen to that—WHICH ISN’T.²⁶ Lovecraft responded to this in a letter to Frank Belknap Long:

If Houtain knew how constant are my struggles against the devastating headaches, dizzy spells, and spells of poor concentrating power which hedge me in on all sides, and how feverishly I try to utilise every available moment for work, he would be less confident in classifying my ills as imaginary. I do not arbitrarily pronounce myself an invalid because of a nervous heredity. The condition itself is only too apparent—the hereditary part is only one explanatory factor.²⁷

Lovecraft’s account must be given its due, but in the event it appears that Houtain was more on the mark, and eventually Lovecraft realized it:

Lovecraft did not express surprise at my pronouncements. In fact he was receptive to them. I came to the conclusion that he was willing to overcome this and would but he isn’t allowed to do so, because others in his immediate household won’t permit him to forget this hereditary nervousness. As it is Lovecraft is a mental and physical giant, not because of, but in spite of these conditions. I venture the prediction that were he to lose all thoughts of this handed down idea, get out in the world, and rub elbows with the maddening crowd, that he would stand out as a National figure in Belles-Lettres; that his name would top the list in the annals of the literature of the day and I will go so far as to say it would become a house-hold name throughout the breadth and length of this land.

Even now that final pronouncement is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is more accurate than Houtain—or Lovecraft—could ever have imagined. How Lovecraft finally emerged—intellectually, creatively, and personally—from the claustrophobic influence of 598 Angell Street to become the writer, thinker, and human being we know will be the subject of the subsequent chapters of this book.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cynical Materialist (1919–21)

The immediate effects of Susie’s absence from the household at 598 Angell Street were mixed: at times Lovecraft seemed incapable of doing anything because of ‘nerve strain’; at other times he found himself possessed of unwonted energy: ‘I wrote an entire March critical report [i.e., the ‘Department of Public Criticism’ for March 1919] one evening recently, & I am this morning able to write letters after having been up all night’.¹ In a sense, this turn of events—especially in light of Lovecraft’s repeated assurances, which he himself no doubt received from Susie’s doctors, that she was in no physical danger—may have been a relief, for it definitively moved Susie out of the picture as far as Lovecraft’s daily life was concerned.

What exactly was the matter with Susie is now difficult to say, since her Butler Hospital records were among those destroyed in a fire several decades ago. Winfield Townley Scott, however, consulted them when they were still in existence, and he paraphrases them as follows:

She suffered periods of mental and physical exhaustion. She wept frequently under emotional strains. In common lingo, she was a woman who had gone to pieces. When interviewed, she stressed her economic worries, and she spoke … of all she had done for ‘a poet of the highest order’; that is, of course, her son. The psychiatrist’s record takes note of an Oedipus complex, a ‘psycho-sexual contact’ with the son, but observes that the effects of such a complex are usually more important on the son than on the mother, and does not pursue the point.²

The most seemingly spectacular item is the curious mention of a ‘psycho-sexual contact’; but it is surely inconceivable that any actual abuse could have occurred between two individuals who so obviously shared the rigid Victorian sexual mores of the time. There seems every reason to regard Susie’s collapse as primarily brought on by financial worries: there was, let us recall, only $7500 for the two of them from Whipple’s estate, and in addition there was a tiny sum in mortgage payments (usually $37.08 twice a year, in February and August) from a quarry in Providence, the Providence Crushed Stone and Sand Co., managed by a tenant, Mariano de Magistris.

It was perhaps inevitable that Susie’s absence from 598 produced at least the possibility of a certain liberation on Lovecraft’s part, if only in terms of his physical activities. By now a giant in the world of amateur journalism, he was increasingly in demand at various local and national amateur conventions. It was some time before Lovecraft actually ventured forth; but, when he did so, it betokened the definitive end of his period of ‘eccentric reclusiveness’. Kleiner visited him in Providence in 1918. In October 1919 (as I shall relate later) he accompanied several amateurs to Boston to hear his new literary idol, Lord Dunsany. On the evening of 21 June 1920, Edward F. Daas came to Providence for a two-day visit. That summer and fall Lovecraft himself made three separate trips to Boston for amateur gatherings.

The first meeting took place at 20 Webster Street in the suburb of Allston. This house—occupied jointly by Winifred Jackson, Laurie A. Sawyer, and Edith Miniter—was at the time a central meetingplace for the Hub Club. Lovecraft arrived on Monday 4 July, in the company of Rheinhart Kleiner, who had come to Providence the day before. On this occasion Lovecraft spent the night under a roof other than his own for the first time since 1901. His sleeping-place was the home of Alice Hamlet at 109 Greenbriar Street in Dorchester. But, lest we look askance at Lovecraft’s spending the night alone in a young lady’s home, let us be reassured: a convention report in the Epgephi for September 1920 discreetly informs us that ‘he said he’d just got to have a “quiet room to himself”’ and that he and Hamlet were properly chaperoned by Michael Oscar White and a Mrs Thompson.³ The Dorchester party returned to 20 Webster Street the next day to resume festivities, and Lovecraft caught a train home in the early evening.

Miniter (1869–1934) was perhaps the most noted literary figure at this gathering. In 1916 she had published a realistic novel, Our Natupski Neighbors, to good reviews, and her short stories had been widely published in professional magazines. But, in spite of her professional success, she was devoted to the amateur cause. Her loyalty, however, extended to the NAPA and not the UAPA. Among her amateur journals was at least one issue of The Muffin Man (April 1921), which contained her exquisite parody of Lovecraft, ‘Falco Ossifracus: By Mr. Goodguile.’ It is, perhaps, the first such work of its kind.

Miniter invited Lovecraft to attend the Hub Club picnic on 7 August. This gathering consisted largely of old-time amateurs who had been active well before the turn of the century. At one point, as the group was wandering through the Middlesex Fells Reservation, Miniter fashioned a chaplet of bays for Lovecraft and insisted that he wear them at a banquet that evening in honour of his triple laureateship.

Lovecraft’s third Boston trip began on 5 September. He arrived at noon at 20 Webster Street and unexpectedly encountered James F. Morton: ‘Never have I met so thoroughly erudite a conversationalist before, and I was quite surprised by the geniality and friendliness which overlay his unusual attainments. I could but regret the limited opportunities which I have of meeting him, for Morton is one who commands my most unreserved liking.’⁴ Clearly, the rancour surrounding Isaacson’s In a Minor Key had died away. Lovecraft would later have plenty of opportunities to meet Morton during his two-year stay in New York. In the afternoon Lovecraft delivered his lecture, ‘Amateur Journalism: Its Possible Needs and Betterment’.

Some months earlier, at the very beginning of 1920, Lovecraft came in touch with an individual who would play a very large role in his life: Frank Belknap Long, Jr (1901–94). At this time Long, a lifelong New Yorker, was not quite nineteen, and would enter New York University that fall to study journalism, transferring two years later to Columbia. His family was quite well-to-do—his father was a prominent New York dentist—and resided in comfortable quarters on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at 823 West End Avenue. Long had developed an interest in the weird, and he exercised his talents both in prose and in poetry. He joined the UAPA around the end of 1919.

It is not difficult to see why Lovecraft took to Long, and why he saw in him a sort of pendant to his other young disciple, Alfred Galpin. Long may not have had Galpin’s incandescent brilliance as a philosopher, but he was an aesthete, fictionist, and poet; and it was exactly at this time that Lovecraft’s own creative focus was shifting from arid antiquarian poetry and essays to weird fiction. Long’s early Poe-esque work (including the striking tale ‘The Eye Above the Mantel’, United Amateur, March 1921), by no means markedly inferior to Lovecraft’s, no doubt helped convince the latter that the new direction in which he was heading was a potentially fruitful one.

Toward the end of 1919 Lovecraft and Kleiner began a desultory discussion of women, love, and sex. Kleiner, apparently, had always been susceptible to the temptations of the fair, and Lovecraft looked upon his varied involvements with a mixture of mild surprise, amusement, and perhaps a certain lofty contempt. At one point he remarks:

Of course, I am unfamiliar with amatory phenomena save through cursory reading. I always assumed that one waited till he encountered some nymph who seemed radically different to him from the rest of her sex, and without whom he felt he could no longer exist. Then, I fancied, he commenced to lay siege to her heart in businesslike fashion, not desisting till either he won her for life, or was blighted by rejection.⁵

But is it really the case that Lovecraft was ‘unfamiliar with amatory phenomena’? There is perhaps some small reason for doubt on the matter; and it centres upon an individual who has been mentioned sporadically during the last chapter—Winifred Virginia Jackson (1876–1959).

According to research done by George T. Wetzel and R. Alain Everts, Jackson had married Horace Jordan, a black man, around 1915; at that time she resided at 57 Morton Street in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Wetzel and Everts believe that she divorced in early 1919,⁶ although she continued to be listed in the UAPA membership list under her married name until September 1921. By January 1920 she was living, along with two other female amateurs, at 20 Webster Street in Allston.

Jackson and Lovecraft certainly do seem to have done a considerable amount of amateur work together. Along with several others, they edited and published three issues of The United Cooperative (1918–21), and she was associate editor of The Silver Clarion at a time when Lovecraft was giving a certain amount of attention to that journal. Jackson was Second Vice-President of the UAPA for three consecutive years (1917–20), when Lovecraft was President (1917–18) and Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism (1918–19). Then, of course, there are the two stories cowritten by Jackson and Lovecraft.

None of this would suggest that Lovecraft and Jackson were anything but occasionally close working colleagues were it not for some remarks made by Willametta Keffer, an amateur of a somewhat later period, to George T. Wetzel in the 1950s. According to Wetzel, Keffer told him that (and here Wetzel is paraphrasing a letter by Keffer) ‘everybody in Amateur Journalism thought Lovecraft would marry Winifred Jordan’; Keffer herself stated to Wetzel, ‘A long time member of NAPA who knew and met both HPL and Winifred Virginia told me of the “romance”’.

It is difficult to know what to make of this. Lovecraft must have met Jackson in person no later than the summer of 1920, since she was then residing at 20 Webster Street in Allston, where Lovecraft stopped on at least two occasions; but, strangely enough, he does not mention her in any of his various accounts of his trips there. He did write an effusive article, ‘Winifred Virginia Jackson: A “Different” Poetess’, in the United Amateur for March 1921; and he spent Christmas Day of 1920 writing a quaint poem upon receiving a photograph of her—presumably her Christmas gift to him, ‘On Receiving a Portraiture of Mrs. Berkeley, ye Poetess’.

Jackson really was a very attractive woman, and the fact that she was fourteen years older than Lovecraft need not preclude a romance between the two. But one other fact must now be adduced: although by this time divorced, Jackson (according to Wetzel and Everts) was carrying on an affair with the noted black poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962), and she would remain involved with him for many years. Did Lovecraft know this? I find it impossible to believe, given his extraordinarily strict views on the need to maintain an absolute ‘colour line’ prohibiting any sort of sexual union between blacks and whites; if he had known, he would have dropped Jackson immediately even as a colleague. He might not even have known that Horace Jordan was black. Lovecraft of course did know of Braithwaite, who by this time was already the most prominent black critic in the country; he would correspond with him briefly in 1930. As literary editor of the influential Boston Transcript and as editor of the annual Anthology of Magazine Verse (1913–29), Braithwaite occupied a formidable position in American poetry at this time.

There is one further bit of evidence that seems to clinch the matter of a romance between Lovecraft and Jackson. Lovecraft’s wife Sonia Davis told R. Alain Everts in 1967 that ‘I stole HPL away from Winifred Jackson’.⁷ How this happened will be the subject of a later chapter; but this romance, if it could really be called that, appears to have been very languidly pursued on both sides. There is no evidence that Jackson ever came to Providence to visit Lovecraft, as Sonia frequently did even though she lived much farther away (Brooklyn), and after Sonia ‘stole’ him we hear little of Winifred either from Lovecraft or in the amateur press generally.

Meanwhile Lovecraft was not done travelling. Two more trips to Boston were made in the early months of 1921, both again for amateur conventions. On 22 February the Boston Conference of Amateur Journalists was held at Quincy House. In the afternoon session Lovecraft delivered a paper, written the previous day, on a prescribed subject, ‘What Amateurdom and I Have Done for Each Other’. Later Lovecraft engaged in various discussion—mostly with W. Paul Cook and George Julian Houtain—but declined an invitation to sing, even though he had apparently done so at the September 1920 gathering. So Lovecraft’s days as a plaintive tenor were not wholly over!

A month later Lovecraft returned to Boston for a St Patrick’s Day gathering of amateurs on 10 March. This took place at 20 Webster Street. Members were seated in a circle in the parlour, and literary contributions were recited in sequence. Lovecraft on this occasion read the story ‘The Moon-Bog’, written expressly for the occasion; it received abundant applause, but did not win the prize.

Lovecraft was planning yet another trip in early June, this time to New Hampshire to visit Myrta Alice Little in Hampstead, near Westville (just over the Massachusetts border, a few miles north of Haverhill). But Lovecraft’s one surviving letter to Little, written on 17 May 1921, in which he outlined the plans for the trip, was written only a week before the most traumatic event of his entire life up to this point: the death of his mother on 24 May. In ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ Lovecraft suggests that the immediate postwar period led to the solidification of his philosophical thought:

The Peace Conference, Friedrich Nietzsche, Samuel Butler (the modern), H. L. Mencken, and other influences have perfected my cynicism; a quality which grows more intense as the advent of middle life removes the blind prejudice whereby youth clings to the vapid ‘all’s right with the world’ hallucination from sheer force of desire to have it so. These ‘influences’ are certainly a heterogeneous lot, and they seem primarily influential in Lovecraft’s ethical, political, and social philosophy. What he does not state here are what appear to be the two central influences on his metaphysical thought of the time— Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1899; English translation 1900) and Hugh Elliot’s Modern Science and Materialism (1919).

When Lovecraft stated his philosophy as ‘mechanistic materialism’, he was intent on denying certain key tenets of idealistic or religious philosophy; specifically, that any event can occur in the universe beyond the bounds of natural law (although all natural laws may not currently be known, or may never be known); that any ‘immaterial’ substance (such as the ‘soul’) can exist; and that the universe as a whole is progressing toward any particular goal. The denial of God, the soul, and an afterlife is implicit in all these formulations.

Mechanistic materialism as a philosophy, of course, goes back to the Presocratics, specifically Leucippus and Democritus, the cofounders of atomism and very strong proponents of determinism. Among modern thinkers materialism made considerable headway in the seventeenth (Hobbes), eighteenth (Helvétius, La Mettrie, d’Holbach), and nineteenth centuries, in part through the rediscovery of the ancient materialists and much more importantly through increasing advances in science. Indeed, Lovecraft’s chief philosophical influences are all from the nineteenth century— Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, and others who by their pioneering work in biology, chemistry, and physics systematically brought more and more phenomena under the realm of the known and the natural.

One of the greatest weapons Lovecraft found in his battle against religious metaphysics was anthropology. The anthropological thought of the later nineteenth century had, in Lovecraft’s mind, so convincingly accounted for the natural origin of religious belief that no further explanation was required for its tenacious hold on human beings. This conception is discussed at length in the essay ‘Idealism and Materialism—A Reflection’, which was published in an issue of the National Amateur dated July 1919. The notion that primitive human beings were, to put it crudely, merely bad philosophers who misapprehended the true nature of phenomena was evolved by a number of important anthropologists of the later nineteenth century. I would like to believe that Lovecraft read Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), a landmark work in its field that is still of value, but can find no evidence that he ever did so. We are on more certain ground if we contend that Lovecraft’s anthropology of religion comes from John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers (1872) and Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890f.), which he clearly did read (although Frazer perhaps not this early). Fiske’s book was in his library. Like Haeckel, John Fiske (1842–1901) has suffered somewhat of a decline in esteem, but in his day he was highly noted as an anthropologist, philosopher, and (in his later years) historian.

I want at last to address certain curious statements made in ‘A Confession of Unfaith’, wherein Lovecraft attests to his ‘cynical materialism’ and his ‘pessimistic cosmic views’, for they will provide a transition to a study of Lovecraft’s early ethics. Why cynical? why pessimistic? What is there in materialism or cosmicism that could lead to such an ethical stance? Well, as a matter of pure logic, nothing: materialism and cosmicism, as metaphysical principles, have no direct ethical corollaries, and it therefore becomes our task to ascertain how and why Lovecraft felt that they did. Let us consider some statements of the 1919–20 period:

There is a real restfulness in the scientific conviction that nothing matters very much; that the only legitimate aim of humanity is to minimise acute suffering for the majority, and to derive whatever satisfaction is derivable from the exercise of the mind in the pursuit of truth.⁸ The secret of true contentment … lies in the achievement of a cosmical point of view.⁹

Once again it must be emphasized that neither of these ethical precepts is a direct corollary of cosmicism; they are, rather, varying psychological responses to Lovecraft’s awareness of the cosmic insignificance of humanity in a boundless universe.

A passage in a letter of 1920 is one of his most poignant early ethical remarks, and here he explicitly ties Epicureanism, Schopenhauerianism, and cosmicism into a neat (if not logically defensible) whole:

About the time I joined the United I was none too fond of existence. I was 23 years of age, and realised that my infirmities would withhold me from success in the world at large. Feeling like a cipher, I felt I might as well be erased. But later I realised that even success is empty. Failure though I be, I shall reach a level with the greatest—and the smallest—in the damp earth or on the final pyre. And I saw that in the interim trivialities are not to be despised. Success is a relative thing—and the victory of a boy at marbles is equal to the victory of an Octavius at Actium when measured by the scale of cosmic infinity. So I turned to observe other mediocre and handicapped persons about me, and found pleasure in increasing the happiness of those who could be helped by such encouraging words or critical services as I am capable of furnishing. That I have been able to cheer here and there an aged man, an infirm old lady, a dull youth, or a person deprived by circumstances of education, affords to me a sense of being not altogether useless, which almost forms a substitute for the real success I shall never know. What matter if none hear of my labours, or if those labours touch only the afflicted and mediocre? Surely it is well that the happiness of the unfortunate be made as great as possible; and he who is kind, helpful, and patient with his fellow-sufferers, adds as truly to the world’s combined fund of tranquillity as he who, with greater endowments, promotes the birth of empires, or advances the knowledge of civilisation and mankind.¹⁰

This quotation above may help us to understand why Lovecraft initially derived pessimism from cosmicism. His various comments to the contrary notwithstanding, I suspect he did suffer a sort of disillusion when he contemplated the myriad worlds of infinite space; the first reaction may well have been one of exhilaration, but perhaps not much later there came to him the sensation of the utter futility of all human effort in light of the vastness of the cosmos and the inconsequentiality of mankind in it. At a still later stage Lovecraft turned this pessimism to his advantage, and it became a bulwark against the tragedies of his own existence—his failure to graduate from high school and enter college; his failure to secure a job; his dissatisfaction with the progress of his writing— since these things could be regarded as cosmically unimportant, however large they loomed in his own circumstances. Lovecraft largely abandoned Schopenhauerian pessimism over the next decade or so, evolving instead his notion of ‘indifferentism’; but this should be treated at a later stage.

Philosophy was only one of Lovecraft’s many concerns in this period. Perhaps more significantly for his future career, he simultaneously began—or attempted to begin—separating himself from amateur activity and turning determinedly to fiction-writing. We can at last study the influence of Lord Dunsany on his fiction, as well as the many other tales of supernatural horror that laid the groundwork for his later, more substantial fiction.

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878–1957) became the eighteenth Lord Dunsany (pronounced Dun-SAY-ny) upon the death of his father in 1899. He could trace his lineage to the twelfth century, but few members of this Anglo-Norman line had shown much aptitude for literature. Dunsany himself did not do so in his early years, spent alternately in various homes in England and in Dunsany Castle in County Meath. He had gone to Eton and Sandhurst, had served in the Boer War, and appeared on his way to occupying an undistinguished place amongst the Anglo-Irish aristocracy as sportsman, hunter, and socialite. He married Beatrice Villiers, daughter of the Earl of Jersey, in 1904.

In 1904 Dunsany sat down and wrote The Gods of Pegana. Having no literary reputation, he was forced to pay for its publication with Elkin Mathews of London. Never again, however, would Dunsany have to resort to vanity publishing.

The Gods of Pega na, with its rhythmic prose and cosmic subject matter, both self-consciously derived from the King James Bible, introduced something unique to literature. Here was an entire theogony whose principal motivation was not the expression of religious fervour (Dunsany was in all likelihood an atheist) but an instantiation of Oscar Wilde’s imperishable dictum: ‘The artist is the creator of beautiful things.’¹¹ While there are a number of provocative philosophical undercurrents in The Gods of Pegana, as in Dunsany’s work as a whole, its main function is merely the evocation of beauty—beauty of language, beauty of conception, beauty of image. Readers and critics alike responded to this rarefied creation of exotic loveliness, with its seamless mixture of naivety and sophistication, archaism and modernity, sly humour and brooding horror, chilling remoteness and quiet pathos.

By the time Lovecraft discovered him, Dunsany had published much of the fiction and drama that would gain him fame, even adulation, on both sides of the Atlantic: Time and the Gods (1906); The Sword of Welleran (1908); A Dreamer’s Tales (1910); The Book of Wonder (1912); Five Plays (1914); Fifty-one Tales (1915); The Last Book of Wonder (1916); Plays of Gods and Men (1917). Tales of Three Hemispheres would appear at the very end of 1919, marking the definite end of this phase of his work. By this time, however, Dunsany had achieved idolatrous fame in America. In 1916 he had five plays simultaneously produced in New York, as each of the Five Plays appeared in a different ‘little’ theatre off Broadway. His work was appearing in the most sophisticated and highbrow magazines—Vanity Fair, The Smart Set, Harper’s, and (a little later) the Atlantic Monthly. By 1919 Dunsany would probably have been considered one of the ten greatest living writers in the Englishspeaking world.

An examination of Dunsany’s early tales and plays reveals many thematic and philosophical similarities with Lovecraft: cosmicism (largely restricted to The Gods of Pegana); the exaltation of Nature; hostility to industrialism; the power of dream to transform the mundane world into a realm of gorgeously exotic beauty; the awesome role of Time in human and divine affairs; and, of course, the evocative use of language. It is scarcely to be wondered at that Lovecraft felt for a time that Dunsany had said all he wished to say in a given literary and philosophical direction.

Lovecraft could hardly have been unaware of Dunsany’s reputation. He admits to knowing of him well before he read him in 1919, but he had passed him off as a writer of whimsical, benign fantasy of the J. M. Barrie sort. The first work he read was not Dunsany’s own first volume, The Gods of Pegana, but A Dreamer’s Tales, which may well be his best single short story collection in its diversity of contents and its several powerful tales of horror. Lovecraft admits: ‘The book had been recommended to me by one whose judgment I did not highly esteem.’¹² This person was Alice M. Hamlet, an amateur journalist residing in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and probably a member of Winifred Virginia Jackson’s informal coterie of writers.

Lovecraft would repeatedly say, even late in life, that Dunsany ‘has certainly influenced me more than any other living writer’.¹³ The first paragraph of A Dreamer’s Tales ‘arrested me as with an electrick shock, & I had not read two pages before I became a Dunsany devotee for life’.¹⁴

Hamlet had given Lovecraft A Dreamer’s Tales in anticipation of Dunsany’s lecture at the Copley Plaza in Boston on 20 October 1919, part of his extensive American tour. Lovecraft attended the lecture in the company of Miss Hamlet and her aunt. The group secured seats in the very front row, ‘not ten feet’ from Dunsany; it was the closest Lovecraft would ever come to meeting one of his literary idols, since he was too diffident to meet or correspond with Machen, Blackwood, or M. R. James.

Dunsany must at this time have agreed to act as Laureate Judge of Poetry of the UAPA for the 1919–20 term. In this function he probably read some of Lovecraft’s poetry published during that period, but in his letter to UAPA President Mary Faye Durr announcing his decision he makes no reference to any work by Lovecraft. Hamlet, however, presented Dunsany a copy of the Tryout for November 1919, which contained one of two poems written on Dunsany by Lovecraft. ‘To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany’ must have been written very shortly after Lovecraft’s attendance of the lecture; it is a dreadful, wooden poem that starkly reveals the drawbacks of using the Georgian style for subjects manifestly unsuited to it. Dunsany, however, remarked charitably in a letter published in the Tryout that the tribute was ‘magnificent’ and that ‘I am most grateful to the author of that poem for his warm and generous enthusiasm, crystallised in verse’.¹⁵ A few months later Lovecraft wrote a much better tribute in three simple stanzas of quatrains, ‘On Reading Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder’ (Silver Clarion, March 1920). Dunsany apparently never read this poem.

It is easy to see why a figure like Dunsany would have had an immediate appeal for Lovecraft: his yearning for the unmechanized past, his purely aesthetic creation of a gorgeously evocative ersatz mythology, and his ‘crystalline singing prose’ (as Lovecraft would memorably characterize it in ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’) made Lovecraft think that he had found a spiritual twin in the Irish fantaisiste. As late as 1923 he was still maintaining that ‘Dunsany is myself … His cosmic realm is the realm in which I live; his distant, emotionless vistas of the beauty of moonlight on quaint and ancient roofs are the vistas I know and cherish.’¹⁶ And one must also conjecture that Dunsany’s position as an independently wealthy nobleman who wrote what he chose and paid no heed to popular expectations exercised a powerful fascination for Lovecraft: here was an ‘amateur’ writer who had achieved tremendous popular and critical success; here was a case where the aristocracy of blood and the aristocracy of intellect were conjoined.

The string of Dunsanian pastiches that Lovecraft produced in 1919–21 are scarcely worth studying in detail. Their actual debt to Dunsany—except in several surface features and, of course, in overall style and otherworldly content—has perhaps been exaggerated, and many of them do reveal concerns central to Lovecraft’s own temperament; but on the whole they are not among his finest tales, even of his early period. ‘The White Ship’, written in October 1919 and superficially based on Dunsany’s ‘Idle Days on the Yann’ (in A Dreamer’s Tales), is an interesting allegory on the loss of hope. Somewhat similar, and considerably more poignant, is ‘The Quest of Iranon’, perhaps the best of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian tales. ‘The Cats of Ulthar’ (written on 15 June 1920) is one of his most celebrated tales, and remained one of his own favourites in its portrayal of how the cats of the mythical city of Ulthar avenged the death of a kitten at the hands of a cruel couple in that town. ‘Celephaïs’ (written in November 1920) is somewhat embarrassingly derivative of Dunsany’s ‘The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap’ (in The Book of Wonder), in which a man takes to imagining himself a king of a mythical region of the imagination, to the degree that his work in the real world suffers and he is put in a madhouse. In ‘Celephaïs’ much the same thing happens: an unsuccessful writer dreams of the realm of Celephaïs, a realm that he had in fact imagined as a boy; later he occupies the realm permanently, while his body is found washed up by the tide.

Several stories written during this time that have not been considered ‘Dunsanian’ in fact owe something to Dunsany. ‘The Terrible Old Man’ (written on 28 January 1920) is set in the real world (the Massachusetts town of Kingsport, invented for this tale), and deals with the comeuppance of three potential robbers of a seemingly decrepit individual of excessively lengthy years. It recalls many of the tales in The Book of Wonder, which similarly deal with owlish gravity of attempted robberies which usually end badly for the perpetrators.

‘The Street’ was written in late 1919, and may have been inspired by some of the war parables in Dunsany’s Tales of War (1919). The basic plot involves the transformation of some unspecified street (but clearly one in New England) from one occupied by ‘men of strength and honour’ to one inhabited by foreigners. The entire history of the United States is encapsulated in obvious allusions. Finally the Street itself rebels against its occupation by a band of foreign terrorists by blowing itself up.

Lovecraft supplies the genesis of the story in a letter—a strike of the Boston police for much of September and October 1919, during which time the state militia had to be called on to patrol the streets.¹⁷ No doubt it was a very disturbing event, but at this time unionisation and strikes were almost the only option available to the working class for better wages and better working conditions.

‘The Street’ is nothing more than a prose version of such early poems as ‘New England Fallen’ and ‘On a New-England Village Seen by Moonlight’: there is the same naive glorification of the past, the same attribution of all evils to ‘strangers’ (who seem to have ousted those hardy Anglo-Saxons with surprising ease), and, remarkably, even a gliding over of the devastating economic and social effects of the industrial revolution. It is among his poorest works.

What, then, did Lovecraft learn from Dunsany? The answer may not be immediately evident, since it took several years for the Dunsany influence to be assimilated, and some of the most interesting and important aspects of the influence are manifested in tales that bear no superficial resemblance to Dunsany. Perhaps Lovecraft’s most perceptive account of Dunsany’s influence on him occurs in a letter of March 1920: ‘The flight of imagination, and the delineation of pastoral or natural beauty, can be accomplished as well in prose as in verse—often better. It is this lesson which the inimitable Dunsany hath taught me.’¹⁸ This comment was made in a discussion of Lovecraft’s verse writing; and it is no accident that his verse output declined dramatically after 1920. There had been a dichotomy between Lovecraft’s fictional and poetic output ever since he had resumed the writing of stories: how could tales of supernatural horror have any relation to the empty but superficially ‘pretty’ Georgianism of his verse? With the decline of verse writing, that dichotomy disappears—or, at least, narrows—as the quest for pure beauty now finds expression in tales.

More to the point, Lovecraft learned from Dunsany how to enunciate his philosophical, aesthetic, and moral conceptions by means of fiction, beyond the simple cosmicism of ‘Dagon’ or ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’. The relation of dream and reality—dimly probed in ‘Polaris’—is treated exhaustively and poignantly in ‘Celephaïs’; the loss of hope is etched pensively in ‘The White Ship’ and ‘The Quest of Iranon’. Lovecraft found Time and the Gods ‘richly philosophical’,¹⁹ and the whole of Dunsany’s early—and later—work offers simple, affecting parables on fundamental human issues. Lovecraft would in later years express his philosophy in increasingly complex ways as his fiction itself gained in breadth, scope, and richness.

In spite of his own assertions to the contrary, Lovecraft’s ‘Dunsanian’ fantasies are far more than mechanical pastiches of a revered master: they reveal considerable originality of conception while being only superficially derived from Dunsany. Interestingly, Dunsany himself came to this conclusion: when Lovecraft’s work was posthumously published in book form, Dunsany came upon it and confessed that he had ‘an odd interest in Lovecraft’s work because in the few tales of his I have read I found that he was writing in my style, entirely originally & without in any way borrowing from me, & yet with my style & largely my material’.²⁰ Lovecraft would have been grateful for the acknowledgment.

During this period Lovecraft of course did not cease to write tales of supernatural horror, and a number of these display his increasing grasp of short story technique; some of them are also rather good in their own right. One of the most well-known, at least in terms of its genesis, is ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’, written in late December 1919 and, apparently, a virtual literal transcript of a dream in which Lovecraft and Samuel Loveman explore some centuried graveyard, during which Loveman descends the steps of an ancient tomb, never to return. It is an effective, if predictable, story, and first appeared in W. Paul Cook’s Vagrant for May 1920.

‘The Temple’ (probably written in the fall of 1920) requires little discussion, being a confused tale of a German U-boat commander who descends to the bottom of the ocean and comes upon a city built by some ancient civilization. The story is poorly conceived, having an excess of supernatural phenomena that are never adequately explained. Considerably better is ‘Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’ (also written in late 1920), a compact story of miscegenation: Sir Arthur Jermyn learns to his horror that his ancestor, Sir Wade Jermyn, had, during his explorations of the Congo, married a ‘white ape’, leading to the physical and psychological aberrations of the Jermyn line. Curiously enough, Lovecraft admits that the story was actually inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919).²¹ Evidently Lovecraft found Anderson’s exposure of the family secrets of a small American town a bit tame, so he devised a much darker ‘skeleton’ in the Jermyn closet.

‘From Beyond’ (written on 16 November 1920) is almost a caricature of the ‘mad scientist’ tale, but is of interest in that it was clearly derived from some passages in Elliot’s Modern Science and Materialism, particularly those referring to the notion that most material objects consist largely of empty space. In the story, Crawford Tillinghast devises a machine that breaks down the barriers that prevents us from seeing all the loathsome entities that pass by and through us at every moment.

One of the finest tales—or, perhaps, vignettes—of Lovecraft’s early period is the prose poem ‘Nyarlathotep’, written in late 1920. This brief story is nothing more than an allegory on the decline of civilization. The mysterious Nyarlathotep is a kind of itinerant showman whose displays of bizarre phenomena involving light and electricity fascinate the public, but he appears to be a harbinger for the downfall of all human culture. Will Murray has made the plausible conjecture that the figure of Nyarlathotep in this tale may have been based on the eccentric scientist (and part charlatan) Nikola Tesla.²²

Another strong tale is ‘The Picture in the House’, written on 12 December 1920. This simple tale of what a young man travelling through backwoods New England discovers in an apparently abandoned house makes mention of Lovecraft’s second, and most famous, fictional town, Arkham. Beyond that, the story is the first of Lovecraft’s tales not merely to utilize an authentic New England setting but to draw upon what Lovecraft himself clearly felt to be the weird heritage of New England history, specifically the history of Massachusetts. To Lovecraft, the seventeenth century, with its Puritan theocracy, represented a kind of American ‘dark ages’ precisely analogous to the medieval period, and its culminating event—the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692—only confirmed Lovecraft’s impression of it as an epoch of ignorance, darkness, and potential terror. ‘The Picture in the House’ only broaches some of these issues, but later works would elaborate upon them considerably.

‘The Nameless City’, written in January 1921, is, conversely, one of Lovecraft’s poorest tales, but one for which he himself retained an inexplicable fondness. This wild, implausible, histrionic tale of an explorer who tunnels beneath the sands of the Arabian desert and discovers a city formerly inhabited by alien creatures (preserved like mummies in upright coffins) has little to recommend it. It is, however, the first time that Abdul Alhazred is mentioned in Lovecraft’s fiction. ‘The Moon-Bog’, written for that St Patrick’s meeting in March 1921, is similarly a conventional tale of supernatural revenge.

Of ‘The Outsider’—which many believe to be Lovecraft’s signature tale—it is difficult to speak in small compass. To be sure, its depiction of a strange individual who burrows out of what appears to be a subterranean castle and, entering a brightly lit mansion, discovers that he himself is the horrible, decaying monster that has frightened off a band of merry-makers is a poignant exemplar of ‘the soul-shattering consequences of self-knowledge’;²³ but its excessive reliance on Poe-esque diction makes one wonder whether it is much more than an exercise in pastiche. Lovecraft himself came to such a judgment:

Others … agree with you in liking ‘The Outsider’, but I can’t say that I share this opinion. To my mind this tale—written a decade ago—is too glibly mechanical in its climactic effect, & almost comic in the bombastic pomposity of its language. As I re-read it, I can hardly understand how I could have let myself be tangled up in such baroque & windy rhetoric as recently as ten years ago. It represents my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height.²⁴

Many have conjectured on the influences behind the tale, specifically the culminating image of the entity seeing himself in a mirror. The most plausible suggestion, I believe, is that Lovecraft is borrowing from the scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when the monster first sees himself in a pool of water.

It is, however, now time to examine the question of the story’s autobiographical character. The opening sentence reads: ‘Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.’ One of the Outsider’s final remarks—’I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men’—has been taken, perhaps not unjustly, as prototypical of Lovecraft’s entire life, the life of an ‘eccentric recluse’ who wished himself intellectually, aesthetically, and spiritually in the rational haven of the eighteenth century. I think we have already learnt enough about Lovecraft to know that such an interpretation greatly overstates the case: without denying his emphatic and sincere fondness, and even to some degree nostalgia, for the eighteenth century, he was also very much a part of his time, and was an ‘outsider’ only in the sense that most writers and intellectuals find a gulf between themselves and the commonality of citizens. Lovecraft’s childhood was by no means unhappy, and he frequently looked back upon it as idyllic, carefree, and full of pleasurable intellectual stimulation and the close friendship of at least a small band of peers.

Is, then, ‘The Outsider’ a symbol for Lovecraft’s own self-image, particularly the image of one who always thought himself ugly and whose mother told at least one individual about her son’s ‘hideous’ face? I find this interpretation rather superficial, and it would have the effect of rendering the story maudlin and self-pitying. I think it is more profitable not to read too much autobiographical significance in ‘The Outsider’: its large number of apparent literary influences seem to make it more an experiment in pastiche than some deeply felt expression of psychological wounds.

It is difficult to characterise the non-Dunsanian stories of this period. Lovecraft was still experimenting in different tones, styles, moods, and themes in an effort to find out what might work the best. Perhaps the fact that so many of these tales were inspired by dreams is the most important thing about them. Lovecraft’s letters of 1920 are full of accounts of incredibly bizarre dreams, some of which served as the nuclei for tales written years later. It would be a facile and inexpert psychoanalysis to maintain that Lovecraft’s worries over Susie’s health were the principal cause of these disturbances in his subconscious; as a matter of fact, it appears that Susie’s health had, after a fashion, stabilized and that there was no suspicion of any impending collapse until only a few days before her death. Suffice it to say that the dozen or more stories Lovecraft wrote in 1920—more than he wrote in any other year of his life— point to a definitive shift in his aesthetic horizons. Lovecraft still did not know it yet, but he had come upon his life-work.

CHAPTER NINE

The High Tide of My Life (1921–22)

Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft died on 24 May 1921, at Butler Hospital. Her death, however, was not a result of her nervous breakdown but rather of a gall bladder operation from which she did not recover. Winfield Townley Scott, who had access to Susie’s now destroyed medical records, tells the story laconically: ‘She underwent a gall-bladder operation which was thought to be successful. Five days later her nurse noted that the patient expressed a wish to die because “I will only live to suffer.” She died the next day.’¹

Lovecraft’s reaction was pretty much what one might expect: ‘The death of my mother on May 24 gave me an extreme nervous shock, and I find concentration and continuous endeavour quite impossible … I cannot sleep much, or labour with any particular spirit or success.’² Later on in this letter, written nine days after the event, Lovecraft adds disturbingly:

For my part, I do not think I shall wait for a natural death; since there is no longer any particular reason why I should exist. During my mother’s life-time I was aware that voluntary euthanasia on my part would cause her distress, but it is now possible for me to regulate the term of my existence with the assurance that my end would cause no one more than a passing annoyance. Evidently his aunts did not figure much in this equation. But it was a passing phase, as we shall shortly see.

What, in the end, are we to make of Lovecraft’s relations with his mother? Susie Lovecraft has not fared well at the hands of Lovecraft’s biographers, and her flaws are readily discernible: she was overly possessive, clearly neurotic, failed (as Lovecraft himself and the rest of his family did) to foresee the need for training her son in some sort of remunerative occupation, and psychologically damaged Lovecraft at least to the point of declaring him physically hideous and perhaps in other ways that are now irrecoverable.

But the verdict on Susie should not be entirely negative. Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, correctly remarks: ‘Lovecraft’s finely honed aesthetic sensibilities and seasoned artistic judgment undoubtedly owed something to the early influence of his mother … The wonderful home which Susie and her young son shared with her parents and sisters at 454 Angell Street during the 1890s must have been truly a delight.’³ Her indulging Lovecraft in many of his early whims—the Arabian Nights, chemistry, astronomy—may seem excessive, but it allowed him fully to develop these intellectual and aesthetic interests, and so to lay the groundwork for both the intellect and the creativity he displayed in later years.

The critical issue is whether Lovecraft knew and acknowledged— at least to himself—the ways in which his mother affected him, both positively and adversely. In letters both early and late he speaks of her with nothing but praise and respect. In many letters of the 1930s, when recalling his early years, he makes statements such as: ‘My health improved vastly and rapidly, though without any ascertainable cause, about 1920–21’;⁴ which gives—or appears to give—not the slightest hint that Susie’s death might actually have been a liberating factor of some kind. But was Lovecraft really so lacking in self-awareness on this issue? I have already cited Sonia’s noting that Lovecraft once admitted to her that Susie’s influence upon him had been ‘devastating’. Another very interesting piece of evidence comes not from a letter or an essay, or from a memoir by a friend, but from a story.

‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ (1933) tells the tale of Edward Derby, who was an only child and ‘had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children.’ A little later the narrator remarks: ‘Edward’s mother died when he was thirty-four, and for months he was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took him to Europe, however, and he managed to pull out of his trouble without visible effects. Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage.’ That last sentence is all the evidence we need: it makes it abundantly clear that Lovecraft knew (by 1933, at any rate) that Susie’s death had in a sense made the rest of his own life possible. It is telling that, in his litany of ‘near-breakdowns’ beginning in 1898, he lists no breakdown of 1921.

In the short term Lovecraft did the most sensible thing he could have done: continue the normal course of his existence. He may not, like Derby, have travelled to Europe, but there was always New Hampshire. He went ahead with his visit to Myrta Alice Little on 8–9 June, also seeing ‘Tryout’ Smith in Haverhill. He repeated the trip in August. Later that month he went with his old school chum Harold Munroe to their old clubhouse in Rehoboth (which Lovecraft was delighted to find nearly intact), and still later he took in another amateur meeting in Boston.

Meanwhile events in the amateur world were heating up. Lovecraft had easily been elected Official Editor for the 1920–21 and 1921–22 terms, and his ‘literary’ faction was in both political and editorial control of the association: Alfred Galpin was President in 1920–21 (serving, anomalously, also as Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism), and Ida C. Haughton of Columbus, Ohio, was President in 1921–22; other associates of Lovecraft such as Paul J. Campbell, Frank Belknap Long, and Alice Hamlet all held official positions.

But the picture was by no means rosy. Lovecraft had considerable disagreements with President Haughton, and years later he claimed that she ‘ran the very gamut of abuse & positive insult— culminating even in an aspersion on my stewardship of the United funds!’⁵ In response, Lovecraft wrote ‘Medusa: A Portrait’ in late 1921. This is the most vicious and unrestrained of his poetic satires, and in it he mercilessly flays Haughton for her large bulk and her supposed foulness of temper. The poem was published in the Tryout for December 1921.

There was trouble on other fronts also. In the Woodbee for January 1922 Fritter continued his attacks on Lovecraft and his literary coterie. Although Lovecraft responded tartly in his ‘Editorial’ in the January 1922 United Amateur, in this case he was not to prevail. In the UAPA election in July 1922, the ‘literature’ side lost out to its opponents. Lovecraft himself lost to Fritter for Official Editor by a vote of 44 to 29. It was, no doubt, a staggering blow, and may have gone a long way in showing Lovecraft that this phase of his amateur career was coming to an end.

But Lovecraft had the last laugh. The new official board did manage to produce six issues of the United Amateur, but at the convention in late July 1923 Lovecraft’s literary party was almost entirely voted back into office; incredibly, Sonia H. Greene was elected President even though she had not knowingly placed herself on the ballot. This whole turn of events appeared to rile Fritter and his colleagues, and they acted in an obstructionist manner toward the new official board; the Secretary-Treasurer, Alma B. Sanger, withheld funds and failed to answer letters, so that no United Amateur could be printed until May 1924. No convention was held in 1924, and evidently the official board for that year was re-elected by a mail vote; but that administration produced only one more issue (July 1925)—an issue remarkable for its complete dominance by members of Lovecraft’s literary circle (Frank Belknap Long, Samuel Loveman, Clark Ashton Smith, and of course Lovecraft himself). This ended Lovecraft’s official involvement with the UAPA. Although he strove valiantly to establish the next official board (Edgar J. Davis as President, Victor E. Bacon as Official Editor), it never really took off and, after one or two skimpy issues of the United Amateur, it died some time in 1926.

Lovecraft was by no means aloof from the affairs of the NAPA. It is somewhat ironic that the only two national conventions he ever attended, in 1921 and 1930, were those of the NAPA, not the UAPA. The NAPA convention of 1921 was held on 2–4 July in Boston. At the banquet on 4 July Lovecraft himself gave a speech; it survives under the title ‘Within the Gates: By “One Sent by Providence”’. Next to some of his humorous short stories, it is the wittiest of Lovecraft’s prose performances. The speech is full of genial barbs directed at Houtain, Edith Miniter, and other amateurs, and concludes by apologizing for the ‘long and sonorous intellectual silence’ of the speech (it is less than a thousand words).

One of the individuals who must have been in the audience was Sonia Haft Greene (1883–1972). Sonia had been introduced to amateur journalism by James F. Morton, whom she had known since 1917. She was one of a contingent of NAPA members from the New York area (among them Morton, Rheinhart Kleiner, and others) to go to the convention, and Kleiner later testified that he introduced her to Lovecraft at the event.⁶ Very shortly thereafter Sonia became an ardent supporter of the amateur cause, and not only joined the UAPA but contributed the unheard-of sum of $50.00 to the Official Organ Fund.

It is a pity that we know so relatively little about the woman whom Lovecraft would marry less than three years later. She was born Sonia Haft Shafirkin on 16 March 1883, in Ichnya (near Kiev) in the Ukraine. Her father, Simyon Shafirkin, apparently died when she was a child. Her mother, Racille Haft, left Sonia with her brother in Liverpool—where Sonia received her first schooling— and herself came to America, where she married Solomon H—— (full name unknown) in 1892. Sonia joined her mother later that year. She married Samuel Seckendorff in 1899—she was not quite sixteen, her husband twenty-six. A son, born in 1900, died after three months, and a daughter, Florence, was born on 19 March 1902. Seckendorff, a Russian, later adopted the name Greene from a friend in Boston, John Greene. The marriage was apparently very turbulent, and Samuel Greene died in 1916, apparently by his own hand.

Sonia had taken some extension courses at Columbia University, and had secured an executive position (with a salary of $10,000 a year) at Ferle Heller’s, a clothing store. (The store had two outlets, one at 36 West 57th Street and the other at 9 East 46th Street; Sonia, whose specialty was hats, worked at the former shop.) She resided at 259 Parkside Avenue in the then fashionable Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

Kleiner describes her physically as ‘a very attractive woman of Junoesque proportions’; Galpin, while using exactly the same classical adjective, paints a more piquant portrait:

When she dropped in on my reserved and bookish student life at Madison [in 1921 or 1922], I felt like an English sparrow transfixed by a cobra. Junoesque and commanding, with superb dark eyes and hair, she was too regal to be a Dostoievski character and seemed rather a heroine from some of the most martial pages of War and Peace. Proclaiming the glory of the free and enlightened human personality, she declared herself a person unique in depth and intensity of passion and urged me to Write, to Do, to Create.⁷

Sonia was taken with Lovecraft from the start. She bluntly confesses that, when first meeting Lovecraft, ‘I admired his personality but frankly, at first, not his person’⁸—a clear reference to Lovecraft’s very plain looks (tall, gaunt frame, lantern jaw, possible problems with facial hair and skin) and perhaps also his stiff, formal conduct and (particularly annoying to one in the fashion industry) the archaic cut of his clothes.

But a correspondence promptly ensued. Lovecraft heard from Sonia as early as mid- to late July of 1921, by which time she had already read some of Lovecraft’s stories that had appeared in the amateur press. Lovecraft professed to be taken with her, at least as an intellect.

It was Sonia who took things into her own hands. She visited Lovecraft in Providence on 4–5 September, staying at the Crown Hotel. Lovecraft, as had already become customary with his out-oftown visitors, showed her the antiquarian treasures of Providence, took her back to 598 and introduced her to aunt Lillian. The next day Sonia invited Lovecraft and his aunt to come to the Crown for a noon meal.

In the meantime Sonia contributed to the amateur cause in other than monetary ways. In October 1921 the first of two issues of her Rainbow appeared; both would be forums for the poetic, fictional, essayistic, and polemical outpourings of Lovecraft and his inner circle of amateur colleagues. Lovecraft contributed a piece entitled ‘Nietzscheism and Realism’, which he declares was a series of extracts made from two letters to Sonia.⁹ This compendium of philosophical bon mots comprises, sadly enough, almost the sole remnant (aside from a handful of postcards and one other item to be discussed later) of what must have been an extensive and exceptionally fascinating correspondence—one which we would, from a biographical perspective, wish to have perhaps more than any other of Lovecraft’s. But Sonia is clear on its fate: ‘I had a trunkful of his letters which he had written me throughout the years but before leaving New York for California [around 1935] I took them to a field and set a match to them.’¹⁰ No doubt Sonia, after all she had been through, was within her rights to do this, but all students of Lovecraft must groan when reading this terse utterance.

Being a professional amateur was perfectly suited to Lovecraft’s aristocratic temperament, but, as time went on and the family inheritance increasingly dwindled, some thought had to be paid to making money. Lovecraft was surely aware of the principal reason for his mother’s nervous collapse—her worries about the financial future of herself and her son. Perhaps it was this that finally led him to make some effort at earning an income; for it is at this time that David Van Bush appears on the scene.

Bush had joined the UAPA in 1916. Lovecraft first mentions him, to my knowledge, in the summer of 1918. From 1915 into the late 1920s Bush wrote an appalling number of poetry volumes and pop psychology manuals, most of them self-published. It is a dreary possibility that Lovecraft revised the bulk of these books, both prose and verse.

The fact is that Bush did become quite popular as a writer and lecturer on popular psychology. Lovecraft did not begin working in earnest for Bush until around 1920, and it is no accident that Bush’s titles begin appearing at a rapid rate thereafter. Lovecraft regarded Bush with a mixture of annoyance and lofty condescension. He met Bush in the summer of 1922, when the latter was lecturing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and paints a vivid portrait of him:

David V. Bush is a short, plump fellow of about forty-five, with a bland face, bald head, and very fair taste in attire. He is actually an immensely good sort—kindly, affable, winning, and smiling. Probably he has to be in order to induce people to let him live after they have read his verse. His keynote is a hearty good-fellowship, and I almost think he is rather sincere about it. His ‘success-in-life’ stuff is no joke so far as finance is concerned; for with his present ‘psychological’ mountebank outfit, his Theobaldised books of doggerel, and his newly-founded magazine, Mind Power Plus, he actually shovels in the coin at a very gratifying rate. Otherwise he’d never have a suite at the Copley-Plaza.¹¹

The letter goes on at some length, touching on Bush’s rural upbringing, his wife, his odd jobs (trick cyclist in a circus, ‘ham’ actor, clergyman), and his ‘new gospel of dynamic pychology’ (‘which has all the virtues of “New Thought” plus a saving vagueness which prevents its absurdity from being exposed before the credulous public amongst whom his missionary labours lie’).

Lovecraft could not afford to scorn David Van Bush: he was a regular customer, and he paid promptly and well. In 1917 Lovecraft was charging a rate of $1.00 for sixty lines of verse; by 1920 Bush had agreed to pay $1.00 for forty-eight lines; and by September 1922 Bush was paying him $1.00 for every eight lines of verse revised. This is a pretty remarkable rate, given that the best Lovecraft could do with his own professionally published poetry was to get 25 cents per line for verse in Weird Tales. Lovecraft goes on to note: ‘I told him that only at this high price could I guarantee my own personal service—he doesn’t like Morton’s work so well, and asked me to do as much as possible myself.’¹² What this clearly means is that Lovecraft and Morton have teamed up to do revisory work. How formal was such an arrangement? It is difficult to tell, but consider the following ad that appeared in the amateur journal L’Alouette (edited by Charles A. A. Parker) in September 1924:

THE CRAFTON SERVICE BUREAU offers the expert assistance of a group of highly trained and experienced specialists in the revision and typing of manuscripts of all kinds, prose or verse, at reasonable rates.

THE BUREAU is also equipped with unusual facilities for all forms of research, having international affiliations of great importance. Its agents are in a position to prepare special articles on any topic at reasonable notice. It has a corps of able translators, and can offer the best of service in this department, covering all of the important classical and modern languages, including the international language Esperanto. It is also ready to prepare and supervise courses of home study or reading in any field, and to furnish expert confidential advice with reference to personal problems. APPLICATIONS and INQUIRIES may be addressed to either of the heads of THE BUREAU:

Howard P. Lovecraft, 598 ANGELL STREET,

James F. Morton, Jr., 211 WEST 138TH STREET,

PROVIDENCE, R.I. NEW YORK, N.Y.

Lovecraft (or Morton) has certainly caught the spirit of advertising! I have no idea how much business this wildly exaggerated ad— suggesting that Lovecraft and Morton were ‘heads’ of a non-existent bureau of editors, revisors, translators, and solvers of ‘personal problems’—brought in; Bush seemed to remain Lovecraft’s chief revision client until well into the 1920s. It is likely that many of the ‘services’ noted above were provided by Morton. Even those ‘personal problems’ were probably under Morton’s jurisdiction, since among his published works was at least one collaborative treatise on sex morality. It is, in any case, difficult to imagine Lovecraft at this stage dealing with anyone’s personal problems but his own.

In the midst of all this activity, both amateur and professional, Lovecraft finally embarked upon a career of professional fiction publication; inevitably, the opportunity was afforded him by amateur connections. Around September of 1921 George Julian Houtain (who had married the amateur writer E. Dorothy MacLoughlin) conceived the idea of launching a peppy and slightly off-colour humour magazine named Home Brew. As contributors he called upon his various amateur colleagues, and managed to secure pieces from James F. Morton, Rheinhart Kleiner, and others for early issues. For some strange reason he wished Lovecraft to write a serial horror story, even though such a thing would seemingly clash with the general humorous tone of the magazine. He offered Lovecraft the princely sum of $5.00 per two-thousand-word instalment (a quarter of a cent per word). ‘You can’t make them too morbid’, Lovecraft reports Houtain telling him.¹³ The first issue of the magazine duly appeared in February 1922, featuring the first instalment of ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’, which Houtain ran under the title ‘Grewsome Tales’ (‘grewsome’ was a legitimate spelling variant of ‘gruesome’ at this time).

Lovecraft takes a certain masochistic pleasure in complaining at being reduced to the level of a Grub Street hack. Over and over for the next several months he emits whines like the following:

Now this is manifestly inartistic. To write to order, to drag one figure through a series of artificial episodes, involves the violation of all that spontaneity and singleness of impression which should characterise short story work. It reduces the unhappy author from art to the commonplace level of mechanical and unimaginative hack-work. Nevertheless, when one needs the money one is not scrupulous—so I have accepted the job!¹⁴ One gets the impression that Lovecraft actually got a kick out of this literary slumming.

In spite of the fact that the six episodes of ‘Herbert West— Reanimator’ were clearly written over a long period—October 1921 to mid-June 1922—the tale does maintain unity of a sort, and Lovecraft seems to have conceived it as a single entity from the beginning: in the final episode all the imperfectly resurrected corpses raised by Herbert West come back to dispatch him hideously. In other ways the story builds up a certain cumulative power and suspense, and it is by no means Lovecraft’s poorest fictional work. The structural weaknesses necessitated by the serial format are obvious and unavoidable: the need to recapitulate the plot of the foregoing episodes at the beginning of each new one, and the need for a horrific climax at the end of each episode.

No one would deem ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’ a masterpiece of subtlety, but it is rather engaging in its lurid way. It is also my belief that the story, while not starting out as a parody, became one as time went on. In other words, Lovecraft initially attempted to write a more or less serious, if quite ‘grewsome’, supernatural tale but, as he perceived the increasing absurdity of the enterprise, abandoned the attempt and turned the story into what it in fact was all along, a self-parody.

The question of influence might be worth studying briefly. It has casually been taken for granted that the obvious influence upon the story is Frankenstein; but I wonder whether this is the case. The method of West’s reanimation of the dead (whole bodies that have died only recently) is very different from that of Victor Frankenstein (the assembling of a huge composite body from disparate parts of bodies), and only the most general influence can perhaps be detected. The core of the story is so elementary a weird conception that no literary source need be postulated.

It has frequently been believed—based upon Lovecraft’s remark in June 1922 that ‘the pay was a myth after the second cheque’¹⁵— that Lovecraft was never fully paid for the serial; but a letter to Samuel Loveman in November 1922 reports that Houtain has ‘paid up his past debts’ and even advanced Lovecraft $10 for the first two segments of ‘The Lurking Fear’.¹⁶

Lovecraft managed to write two other stories while working desultorily on ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’, and they are very different propositions altogether. ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ appears to have been written in late 1921, probably December. The first of its many appearances was in the National Amateur for March 1922. The story—recounting the tale of Erich Zann, a mute viol-player who dwells in a lofty garret in Paris and apparently plays his bizarre music in order to ward off some nameless entity lurking just outside his window—justifiably remained one of Lovecraft’s own favourite stories, for it reveals a restraint in its supernatural manifestations (bordering, for one of the few times in his entire work, on obscurity), a pathos in its depiction of its protagonist, and a general polish in its language that Lovecraft rarely achieved in later years.

The other story of this period is ‘Hypnos’, probably written in March 1922 and first published in the National Amateur for May 1923. It is a curious but quite substantial tale that has not received the attention it deserves, perhaps because Lovecraft himself in later years came to dislike it. ‘Hypnos’ tells of a sculptor who encounters another man at a railway station, becomes fascinated with him, and apparently undertakes weird dream-travels through space and time in his company. After a particularly horrifying experience, the two men strive to stay awake as much as possible, in an attempt to ward off the strange dreams. Later the friend disappears, and all that is left is an exquisite bust of him in marble, with the Greek word HYPNOS (sleep) inscribed at the base.

It would seem that the interpretation of this story rests on whether the narrator’s friend actually existed or not; but this point may not affect the analysis appreciably. What we have here, ultimately, is, as with ‘The Other Gods’, a case of hybris, but on a much subtler level. At one point the narrator states: ‘I will hint— only hint—that he had designs which involved the rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth and the stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all living things be his.’ This sounds somewhat extravagant, but in the context of the story it is powerful and effective, even though not much evidence is offered as to how the person could have effected this rulership of the universe. In the end, ‘Hypnos’ is a subtilization of a theme already broached in several earlier tales, notably ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’—the notion that certain ‘dreams’ provide access to other realms of entity beyond that of the five senses or waking world.

Shortly after writing ‘Hypnos’ Lovecraft began a series of peregrinations that would not end until October. First on the agenda was Lovecraft’s first trip out of New England—his New York jaunt of 6– 12 April. The trip was, of course, arranged by Sonia. She had visited Cleveland on business some time in late 1921 or early 1922, and there met both Samuel Loveman and Alfred Galpin, who had temporarily settled there after finishing his work at Lawrence College. Developing the idea of convening a group of Lovecraft’s best friends in New York, Sonia persuaded Loveman to come to the metropolis to look for work. Loveman arrived on 1 April but had little success in job-hunting. As a way of keeping him in the city— and, coincidentally, of uprooting Lovecraft from his hermitry— Sonia telephoned Lovecraft and urged him to come down to meet his longtime correspondent. Loveman, Morton, and Kleiner added their encouragement, and Lovecraft’s new protégé Frank Long was also likely to be on hand. These massed invitations did the trick, and Lovecraft caught the 10.06 train from Providence on the 6th.

Five hours later he saw the ‘Cyclopean outlines of New-York’¹⁷ for the first time. There followed an endless round of discussion with his friends, along with museum visiting, sightseeing (they ascended to the top of the Woolworth Building, then the tallest structure in the city), bookstore-hunting, and all the other things that most tourists of a bookish sort do when they hit the big city. Sonia magnanimously turned over her own apartment at 259 Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn to Loveman and Lovecraft, herself sleeping in a neighbour’s apartment. She reports in her memoir at being ‘amazed at myself’ for her ‘boldness’¹⁸ in inviting two men to be guests in her flat.

Certainly the high point for Lovecraft was meeting two of his closest friends, Loveman and Long. Of course, he met often with Sonia, and even once met her ‘flapper offspring’ Florence—a ‘pert, spoiled, and ultra-independent infant rather more hard-boiled of visage than her benignant mater’.¹⁹ Sonia cooked several meals for the gang at her place, which even the ascetic Lovecraft admitted to enjoying. One of the most provocative passages in her memoir relates to an event toward the end of Lovecraft’s stay:

Soon S. L. returned to Cleveland and H. P. remained. My neighbor who so kindly made room for me had a beautiful Persian cat which she brought to my apartment. As soon as H. P. saw that cat he made ‘love’ to it. He seemed to have a language that the feline brother understood, for it curled right up in his lap and purred contentedly.

Half in earnest, half in jest I remarked, ‘What a lot of perfectly good affection to waste on a mere cat, when some woman might highly appreciate it!’ His retort was, ‘How can any woman love a face like mine?’ My counter-retort was, ‘A mother can and some who are not mothers would not have to try very hard.’ We all laughed while Felis was enjoying some more stroking.²⁰

At this point one hardly need belabour Lovecraft’s inferiority complex about his appearance. But Sonia’s intentions were already becoming clear, although perhaps she herself was not yet wholly aware of them.

In late May he visited Myrta Alice Little again in New Hampshire. In early or mid-June was the Cambridge trip to hear David Van Bush lecture. Later that month Sonia, striking while the iron was hot, found a way to spend time in New England and do much visiting with Lovecraft, taking him to Magnolia, Massachusetts, a fashionable watering-place north of Boston. Sonia persuaded Lovecraft to spend several days with her in Magnolia and Gloucester in late June and early July. One evening, while they were strolling along the esplanade on the cliffs of Magnolia, the view of the moon reflecting its light upon the ocean so struck Sonia that she evolved the plot of a horror tale. Encouraged by Lovecraft, she presently wrote it, and Lovecraft revised it. The result was ‘The Horror at Martin’s Beach’, a wild and improbable story about a sea monster that appeared in Weird Tales for November 1923 (under Sonia’s name only) as ‘The Invisible Monster’.

Another story that may have been written at this time is a short macabre tale called ‘Four O’Clock’. In a letter to Winfield Townley Scott, Sonia declares that Lovecraft only suggested changes in the prose of the tale;²¹ hence I concluded that it does not belong in the Lovecraft corpus and did not include it in the revised version of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1989). Judging, however, from her later memoir, Sonia does not seem to have been a very skilled, polished, or even coherent writer, so that Lovecraft probably did contribute something to this story, which is even slighter than its predecessor. Sonia adds a startling note about what happened the day after ‘The Horror at Martin’s Beach’ was conceived:

His continued enthusiasm the next day was so genuine and sincere that in appreciation I surprised and shocked him right then and there by kissing him. He was so flustered that he blushed, then he turned pale. When I chaffed him about it he said he had not been kissed since he was a very small child and that he was never kissed by any woman, not even by his mother or aunts, since he grew to manhood, and that he would probably never be kissed again. (But I fooled him.)²²

This really is pretty remarkable. First, if Lovecraft’s statement here is true, it certainly makes his ‘romance’ with Winifred Jackson an exceptionally platonic one. Second, the matter of his not being kissed even by his aunts or mother since he was a young man makes us wonder about the degree of reserve in this old New England family. Lovecraft’s affection for his aunts—and theirs for him—is unquestioned; but such an unusual lack of physical intimacy is anomalous even for the time and for their social milieu. No wonder Lovecraft was so slow to respond to a woman who so openly expressed affection for him. His emotions had clearly been stunted in this direction.

This week-long trip with Sonia was, as far as I can tell, the first time Lovecraft had spent any considerable amount of time alone in the company of a woman to whom he was not related. Sonia was keen on pursuing matters and managed to get up to Rhode Island again on Sunday 16 July, when she and Lovecraft went to Newport.

Ten days later, on Wednesday 26 July, we find Lovecraft writing again from Sonia’s apartment in Brooklyn: somehow she had managed to persuade him to undertake a trip to Cleveland to see Galpin and Loveman. He spent only three days in a stopover in New York, for on Saturday 29 July, at 6.30 p.m., he boarded the Lake Shore Limited at Grand Central Station for the long train ride to Cleveland. The ride took sixteen hours, and Lovecraft arrived in Cleveland at 10.30 a.m. on the 30th.

Lovecraft stayed until 15 August, mostly at Galpin’s residence at 9231 Birchdale Avenue (the building is now no longer standing). Their habits were roughly in accord with Lovecraft’s own behaviourpatterns at home: ‘We rise at noon, eat twice a day, and retire after midnight.’ An interesting note on the state of Lovecraft’s physical and psychological health is recorded in a later letter to Lillian:

As for the kind of time I am having—it is simply great! I have just the incentive I need to keep me active & free from melancholy, & I look so well that I doubt if any Providence person would know me by sight! I have no headaches or depressed spells—in short, I am for the time being really alive & in good health & spirits. The companionship of youth & artistic taste is what keeps one going!²³

Freedom from his mother’s (and, to a lesser degree, his aunts’) stifling control, travel to different parts of the country, and the company of congenial friends who regarded him with fondness, respect, and admiration will do wonders for a cloistered recluse who never travelled a hundred miles away from home up to the age of thirty-one.

Naturally, they met Samuel Loveman (staying at the Lonore Apartments around the corner) frequently, and it was through Loveman that Lovecraft met several other distinguished littérateurs —George Kirk (1898–1962), the bookseller who had just published Loveman’s edition of Ambrose Bierce’s Twenty-one Letters (1922), and, most notably, the young Hart Crane (1899–1932) and his circle of literary and artistic friends. Lovecraft reports attending a meeting of ‘all the members of Loveman’s literary circle’:

It gave me a novel sensation to be ‘lionised’ so much beyond my deserts by men as able as the painter Summers [sic], Loveman, Galpin, &c. I met some new figures—Crane the poet, Lazar [sic], an ambitious young literary student now in the army, & a delightful young fellow named Carroll Lawrence, who writes weird stories & wants to see all of mine.²⁴

I shall have more to say about both Kirk and Crane later, since Lovecraft would meet them again during his New York period; for now we can note this brief meeting with William Sommer, the watercolourist and draughtsman; William Lescaze, later to become an internationally known architect; Edward Lazare (whom Lovecraft would meet again in New York, and who in later years would become a long-time editor of American Book-Prices Current); and others of Crane’s circle. Crane had just begun to publish his poetry in magazines, although his first volume, White Buildings, would not appear until 1926. Lovecraft must, however, have read Crane’s ‘Pastorale’ (in the Dial for October 1921), for he wrote a parody of it entitled ‘Plaster-All’. While an amusing take-off of what Lovecraft believed to be the formless free verse of the modernists, the poem is really a sort of impressionistic—dare one say imagistic?—account of his Cleveland trip.

Another person with whom Lovecraft came into contact at this time, although only by correspondence, was Clark Ashton Smith. Loveman and Smith were long-time correspondents, and the former showed Lovecraft Smith’s paintings and sketches, while Galpin and Kirk, respectively, presented Lovecraft with copies of Smith’s early collections of poetry, The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912) and Odes and Sonnets (1918). So taken was Lovecraft with both the pictorial and literary material that he forthwith wrote Smith a fan letter toward the end of his Cleveland stay. This almost effusively flattering letter initiated a fifteen-year correspondence that would end only with Lovecraft’s death.